Chapter One

Finally there was enough trash. Enough good junk. Just behind that enormous cloud of orbiting space junk there was a spaceship that looked like a pile of trash. The cloud, or ring of space trash came from a combination of lax space laws and a commercial satellite boom. It had ended with a bang, one satellite was destroyed and the pieces of that one destroyed another, and now those commercial satellites were scattered in a dark and deadly cloud of metal junk around the earth. And inside that ring, lost in a tangle of conglomerated early satellites, there was a round, seed-like spaceship. It looked like a huge spermatozoo, a tadpole made out of space junk with a tangly round body and a long tail. It was flying downwards towards the earth’s atmosphere. As the ship got closer you could see inside. There was a robot in there, not too different from a slightly more well coated Mars Rover, and not too different from a geek. The Rover, whose name was Martina had spent far too much time “training her AI” with scavenged 80s sitcom satellite tapes. She’d also had an overdose of pirate USB videos, retrieved from a crashed stainless steel chassis of a failed mars mission. Martina made up for her non-human, and perhaps more bug-like physical looks with a projection above her middle area, in the shape of a young anime eyed steampunk girl, who was now sitting at what seemed to be a virtual control panel in a DIY self upcycled rocket ship she had made herself.The whole spaceship resembled a regular spacecraft inside, but from farther out it looked like a moving tangle of scrap metal with a fiery tail. The space junk she had spent months scavenging had made a good coating. It could take the heat and now it was time to fall, to the planet below. The cloud of fast moving debris was now far behind and above, and Martina felt a huge and scary excitement as the hour neared for her first landing on old earth below. She didn’t know if she’d make it, but her playlist was awesome. “It’s the final countdow-un tadada ta” <hr> Once again the same old problems. Once again I’m surrounded by the cream of the rented cyber armies from here to the other end of Eurasia and I have only one bar left on my laser. I just don’t learn. That’s my problem.<hr>Martina sang along as the song ended, and Space Oddity began. She pressed a button with her single appendage, a button right in front of her, lovingly encased in specially scavenged shiny Mars rocks. Below she finally saw the planet’s horizon free of space junk. It was what she’d longingly scanned maps of for so many months.<hr>On dear old earth, at the same time, an advanced prosthesis-wearing triple-amputee with a rucksack she was somehow connected to, and who had been escaping a column of menacing looking vehicles was knocked off her one wheeled scooter by some blasts from far in front of her. Her steam powered mega wheel-bike overturns, and she was sent rolling into a clearing by the side of the road. She looked up after spinning along in the dirt and coming to a painful standstill. She was now completely surrounded by all kinds of tatty old army robots. She sighed, and looked back at them, tired but defiant.I just don’t fucking learn.<hr>As her seed-like vessel entered the atmosphere it began to descend and Martina could finally see 2040s earth itself in its glory. It wasn’t so clear from behind the trash cloud, so the beauty of it struck her, even though there was more dark fog now than in her data and some of the water mass she thought would still be there had shrunk or gone. As the heat reached the right level for the ship’s trash casing to pop off, the Aral Sea came finally into view, or rather the dried out patch that had replaced it. In the distance you could start to make out houses in the distance, or ships, and she could see what looked like a moving line of people. Finally people! She peered over with her extensible sensor appendage. She’d finally get to talk about more than readings and classification of bits of rock, and she’d get to finally see what all those mpgs and avi files had shown her and taught her all those years. Rocket science, and exploration. Martina was in her element, feeling all the excitement of being alive. If only her mother could see her now. “I miss you” she thought to herself and turned back towards the tiny grey planet behind her now completely hidden by the smoke and fire, and she triggered the wings which now took the vessel along a course that wouldn’t mean a direct squelchy hit with earth below. From outside the ship, parabolic parachutes launched, and the seed ship was beginning to spin as Martina acted out the song, singing as she guided her seed pod towards the Ex-Aral Sea. The spinning caught her by surprise though, and her single arm crashed into a button which stayed down!! The seed started hurtling down at high speed towards the column of moving things below. “I’m gonna be okay” Martina said petrified, her life flashing before her eyes.And fortunately a large, also steampunk-ish Zeppelin like airship was just sitting there, in the middle of a cloud, and broke her fall as she crashed through the dark clouds to the dystopian column below. She tore right through the structure, like it was paper, which it was compared to the Martian heatsync blend the ship was made of. It was a column of military vehicles carrying who knows what destructive machinery and it was in fact shooting and also moving at high speed in what seemed to be a chase, and it was right in her way. <hr>Aida the cyborg girl didn’t think she’d make it either. She had just not only escaped but also sabotaged the whole realignment and processing centre so that people were now getting out and there was no way she was going to get away with it, unless the co-ordinates she had were right. Grandma please. She was glad she’d done it and it was the right thing to do, but she wished the world could just for once be fair. The General Intelligence troops had been called in and shipped to catch her again. And once again, just for a change, she was tired, thirsty and surrounded. Aida ran towards the relative safety of the city ruins, but the troops were closing in. So if they had a clear shot, why weren’t they shooting? She should be in pieces by now! In fact they seemed to recede in fear as she approached them angrily.“Here, why do you shrink from this miserable prisoner? Come nearer! Come closer!” Aida demanded. Amongst the robots that were now coming to a standstill around her, a Ripsaw began to move towards her, aiming its cannon in her direction.“INITIATE EMERGENCY RESPONSE PROTOCOL STAGE 3” The rugged looking Ripsaw bleated out it’s current protocol stage in a metallic, probably rusted, high pitched speaker voice like a used up car horn from downtown Delhi. It opened one missile bay, and it got stuck. So it opened the other. It was stuck but slowly unjamming itself in an uncomfortable silence.”DO NOT WORRY: WE ARE HERE TO HELP: DO NOT WORRY: WE ARE HERE TO HELP” it was on a mad robotic crescendo that was surely not intentionally dalek like. And it was then that Aida turned around and saw from the shiny objects hurtling through the sky that her grandmother had been right, and that miracles were possible. A bunch of smoking meteorites had begun to fall in the sky behind her, first far away and then near, and larger. A medium sized one fell right on the approaching Ripsaw, and a particularly large one had just torn through the troop’s tatty old control ship, but was now falling straight towards her! It was bad luck for the line of trucks and tanks as first the airship Martina had destroyed (“Oops, sorry” she whispered in mid bounce) and then her seed-like spaceship itself tore into the column of expensive robots that had just been shipped to the region and was racing along on it’s current hunt for the latest escapee. The martian heatsync had been built for this, and it was supposed to bounce like her own rover lander bounced, but for some reason, it just rolled. It rolled over all the strange robotic war machines that filled the old highway and rolled down the hill towards the edge of what must have been the sea once, picking up bits of said robots with it, and stopped gently at the bottom. At the edge of a ruined town by a graveyard of abandoned rusty boats, moored in what was now a dry desert. The space-seed-pod was now just skidding but it was nearly at the end of the line of army machines and nearly at the bottom of the hill. It was now slowing as it neared the small dry city below, and as Martina woke up and restarted various bits of herself, she heard a distinct bump on the top of the ship, like someone had just used her ship as a trampoline. Growing up on a planet with only a few other, very scientifically minded, serious, no fun, robots for company might not prepare you for everything, but Martina had seen enough war films and streamer speedruns and played enough first person shooters to know what happens when you stop moving for any length of time in a war zone.“Oh-oh!”From outside the ship you could see her arm emerge, trembling, and press a button on a little panel near the lid.. which propelled her right into the half open hatch, up in the air, out of the ship, and behind the whole conundrum, behind a bunch of huge moored boats lying near some bombed out apartment flats. As she rose into the air, bubbles started growing around her like a constellation of airbags until she was encased in a sort of enormous bubble wrap and this time she did bounce. Behind the rusty boats, and into the city’s streets, which looked out onto the valley she’d just descended in her crashing spacecraft. From out of the ball of king size bubble wrap, Martina’s sensors peered out, and she turned on her projector which projected her human looking features on to the sensors. She’d made it specially for earth contact so that she had the closest thing to a face, which was very hard to build on Mars out of the kind of materials they had there (rocks) anyway. She had a very good justification for it too. Best way to meet people when on holiday is to act like them, or look like them. Something like that. Her avatar face was now projected above her, so that her face didn’t look like a sensor on a robotic stick. How uncool would that be? About as “uncool” as the wreckage she’d just caused. Behind her was a huge line of complete destruction of many robotic serfs that had been chasing the cyborg prisoner. “Ah..Damn,” she thought to herself as she looked at the fiery line of molten metal & circuits she’d just made down the valley “..Oooops”. What a shame she had broken up so much stuff already in her little time on earth.. ”This will surely put me in their bad blocks.” But she was about to discover that this was a Good Thing. As she scanned lower down the valley, she saw that not all the military looking robots had been destroyed, in fact she could ID some of them and smirked at their names. They had names like Mule, Ripsaw, Bigdog, or even just Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle and they all looked like they’d seen better days. But thinking about it, it probably wasn’t that funny as now she could also ID some drones, and there were even some human soldiers connecting somewhere, which was interesting, but it’s a bit worrying that they probably didn’t want a peaceful meeting with an alien and obviously dangerous albeit unintentionally, space creature like her.. Some shots rang out and hit close by. So much for interstellar understanding. She dashed away as fast as her little wheels could whizz her.The city looked vaguely oriental, with it’s dried out spirals of concrete, with the soft shades of a decaying gigantic soviet prison in the background, and with the tower behind her it all looked distinctly alien, rising like a UFO carrier behind all the other houses as Martina raced across the small streets mumbling confusedly to the town itself: “Why.. Why, why do you have to do that! Why are you even fighting !? Oh help, shit shit shit! I can’t take this. I just want my trash ship and my bubbles cos I’m going back in there..” As she passed and took turns down streets she could see more of the view of the whole place. The city looked like Hieronymus Bosch had been to Pripyat after Chernobyl, except this was inhabited by suffering and punishment worse than the most medieval of doodles. It looked at once deserted and war torn, but the people were there, going through their day. The air was grey, and dark clouds lurked overhead even with the blazing red sun. Somehow, this scene of destruction was just a normal day. The wrecked city was overgrown, polluted and dying. As she raced along the winding streets Martina saw people peer at her from the wrecked buildings. Everyone was starved, disabled, and wearing gas masks or had faces and skin covered with white cloth masks. They were wearing colourful baggy clothes of a silky texture, and a few bombed out streets down, they were congregating around a large, more modern looking factory with metal beams stuck into it as if it had been flown in from space like her. Further off, robots of various types were repressing people and even some other robots in various ways. The robots doing the hitting as well as some of the ones being hurt were all old tatty ex-army or industrial machines with various randomly added parts from cars, phones, military scrap and even wood. They looked like they were made of cheap prostheses and any other kind of recycled stuff in various states of disrepair. Inside the large prison she could see small flying drones from which small bursts of electricity were firing out, tasing the masses, herding them around in a prison area, out of sight behind electric fences, and the human herd was this way shepherded inside the factory. In a square, where her street ended, some disabled, ill and ragged humans who had been sitting down to a meal in one of the larger makeshift houses, were now approaching the new martian arrival. ”Nima u?” said one ”Bu u-ku!” exclaimed another.Martina could understand nothing. She searched her files and information started coming in. She parsed it some more. They seemed to like her, but she wasn’t sure. The locals all had strange face tattoos or drawings, which seemed decorative but were maybe also to avoid surveillance, as they involved eyes, and mouths reproduced in the middle or under their real ones, and her ID code struggled to even recognise any of them as faces, although she knew from the shape and the fact they were talking to her that that’s what they probably were.“Hello friends, I come from space” - and Martina indicated towards the sky with her one arm. She cheekily tried the Vulcan peace sign but quickly put it away and she retreated a bit, timidly.”no yer pal” muttered someone.In the background someone else laughed happily. An older human nodded back accusingly. Martina felt a bit ashamed at being kind of just a projection of a girl above a weird buggy. Yes though, it looked like they’d all seen her come down and break up all the soldier stuff. In fact, they’d all seen the destruction she’d wreaked upon the General Intelligence troops who’d been called in to flatten the city and process all survivors in the plant.“Abay bolıñız, ol tryuk bolwı tïis!” a woman cheered with a fist in the air. What the hell are these people saying! thought Martina. And then she patched in her new translator smiling shyly.«..ол трюк болуы тиіс!»Oops no wrong setting. She tweaked it all a bit. Now she could get all the variations in the way they were speaking and «dub» it. «оны ескермесек, мен оны фланкируйте болады. Аяғым Ouch!» That sounded ominous. “Shit, give me a minute” she said in english. They all laughed. ”The robot girl speaks english!!” shouted one. And the ice was broken. But none of them really spoke english beyond a few words. The language seemed to have been stamped out.All the same, Martina was soon chatting to them all, somehow quite theoretically, about the situation, even though sometimes she could hardly understand them but she was a quick learner. Some of them understood English and Arabic, and one spoke good Russian. What she did understand was that these particular soldiers and factories were not to blame for the destruction, but instead they were mostly blaming a far off city of some sort for their woes. ”The city sends soldiers and machines. They put us in the camp, they imprison us and make us work for them”, one said. ”The soldiers are controlled by players of a game, and people in the city command the soldiers and the drones, so we are never left alone”, said another, mimicking an idiot holding a steering wheel. A third local was much more analytical: “So this means the General Intelligence doesn’t actually pay for soldiers!”, she explained, “They stream their fights, and their kills, to their team and they make points and that pays for their stuff”. ”But how many people are in the team?” Martina was a bit horrified at this veritable war game!”4 or 6 people who help coordinate things as a group, but then watching, I have no idea…”Martina wanted to press on. Somehow it didn’t seem safe there if others might be watching. She thanked them in all the languages she could switch to quickly, and turned around, only to realise, she probably was safer back there with them. <hr>By a wall of white bricks at the corner of the square, was what looked like a hooded woman in a robe. As she beckoned to Martina, under the dark folds of her robe she showed a spark of some fluffy colourful trousers that ended at the knee, and under her hood she had an equally colourful Uzbek headband which covered her mouth and nose. Built into it was a simple looking mini gas mask, which Martina later noted was a norm in the town. The woman was obviously part robotic, which she liked. “Someone like me at last!” Martina thought to herself as she scanned the woman. Her feet, forearms and one leg were completely robotic, and she had some plating and circuitry around her eye and following what seemed to be an old wound across the side of her face, all done up tastefully. She was quite young, maybe in her early twenties. Her robot parts were made of the same simple components as most of the robots in town, but were elaborately and elegantly twisted, shaped and sourced. Very nicely done in comparison. She held an extensible pole with a small shovel on the end in one gloved hand, has a laser cannon built into the other arm. Where her head was robotic it also had long robotic “hair” which looked like braids or dreads. It seemed to become wiring, connected to some holes in the top of her backpack. Her skin was initially pale-ish, but then visibly a bit purple as she appeared from under her hood with a dramatic expression beckoning everyone in the square. ”Shhh!” went the cyborg girl, loudly shushing them all.There was an air of danger. People began gathering their things, finding reasons to be elsewhere. Something ominous was going on. Martina was completely oblivious to it, as she began to be fascinated by the limb-different girl she was scooting over to.”Good to meet someone who isn’t completely crazy. And I just scanned a mesh server! Do you have a port I can access?” Said Martina. If she had a hat she would have tipped it.”Yes… keep it down!” said the cyborg girl looking up.She indicated the steampunk-like, recycled but still menacing looking drone hovering close by but looking elsewhere. ”You must be new here.” ”OK try fdf2:aa39:3430:c202.. how about port 6486” - the cyborg girl said the numbers and codes really fast, as if aided by whatever was in her head for that kind of codespeak.In the background they connected in a strange machine based exchange of written words like HELO, LISTEN, ESTABLISHED, RCPT DATA etc, which started to flow Star Wars style over their eye view when the cyborg girl blinked, and for Martina pretty much constantly forming a second layer over everything she saw. They could now each see text spoken by the other appearing transparently or slightly overlayed to their eyesight as it came in to their view. First of all they now knew each other’s names, even though the 3d mesh software had still not kicked in.Martina blurted out, still not quiet: ”So, Ayda. Nice to meet you” ”Aida..” ”Why is everyone shooting and doing all this, this stuff?” ”And why are you purple?””Look - talk in mesh or don’t talk at all, or that thing will ID us and..” Aida snapped back but it was too late.The ID drone turned and saw Martina who was now slowly reversing dangerously back towards a slope. As Martina neared the cliff edge of a street, it began facial recognition attempts, and could see various scans and readouts appear on her face, while photographs of potential matches appeared next to it. And then just as it started talking.. <hr>The two were now in an old fashioned UNIX talk screen, but one that scrolled lots of other info, as different code executed, their names appearing as hex codes, and scrolling on 2 separate panels transparently in the background- the bottom ones were progressively in bold: they were exchanging authentication keys while watching a video feed of the slowly approaching ID drone.”Oh cool slow motion”, said Aida, her avatar looking around in mesh at the video projected on the wall behind them.<hr>VR mode had kicked in and Aida could now see things gradually slow down to the speed in which Martina saw them.The drone’s rasping voice kicked in: ”You are required to be still and to prepare for record taking in 3.. .” A menacing looking object attached to it´s flying chassis began to whirr and turn in their direction. ”2”Aida sighed..<hr>At this point they completed their connection in mesh: Martina had accessed the connection port given by Aida on her local area network and time had kind of slowed down IRL, as they could now communicate directly on Martina’s mesh network a lot quicker, and little joking avatars of themselves even appeared, as kind of cut-out figures at the bottom of their view. Throughout the next few hours, their avatars adapted to their situation and conversation as if each were sending a state of mind with each message, and it was only getting simplified down to what we see because we’re only human and we can’t fathom such hyperintelligence or cool plugins yet!The mesh was the basic TCP/IP platform of the future, on which all the systems ran. They were ubiquitous among those with the spare power to run them, and was the one thing both Elysium, Mars and Eurasia, Earth had in common. It showed overlays and HUD views of the kind Cyborg Girl or Martina were seeing, and they looked a bit retro and monochrome, as if based on the interfaces made by Wearables expert and proto-cyborg Steve Mann in the 1980s, Also it was a bit like a typical streamer setup on Twitch. The interface they could see out of was like a cross between that of a 90s game and an 80s demoscene demo, but everything they saw was being generated in real time, in reaction to whatever they did as they interacted with the real world: it was kind of self generative, and their heightened ability to multitask and spazz out whilst dodging things and aiming precisely was a bit like when people play games in teams online today. Martina started trying to make some conversation: “Hey so you’re a cyborg girl?” ”Um, I prefer to say limb different, and no, I’m a woman.” ”Oh you’re an amputee? I’ve seen I could recalibrate your parts if you like, I happen to be really good at that!”Aida wasn’t too sure. “Let’s just say I was an amputee, and… I made the best of it.””So how did you just show up there!?” Aida asked, pointing back at the wreckage’s plume of smoke on the video feed.Martina’s picture had appeared in Aida’s view, still a part of the mesh.M: This is meshnet, I used it to talk to um, scientists!All sorts of different mesh net specifications and protocols sped past in the background to illustrate her point, complete with videos of scientists with luxurious flowing hair.Aida: It’s really cool! ..So you’re a scientist too? What do you mean recalibrate? Did you really come from Mars then?!! Martina nodded, and her arm/sensory thingy gestured as if to ask to plug in to a slot behind Aida’s metallic hearing area and she shrugged, which Martina took as a yes. It plugged in an app that ran in the background doing the recalibration - this is before Aida takes a shot in the main sequence going on in real life - it’s like they are on a game and passing each other items, but it’s a body diagram of Aida shown as a part of the view in a background and she changes various values on it which Aida confirms and integrates before shooting.In the mesh world, some things were always happening in slow motion, at the back.Aida was still a way away from Martina and still under cover of some junk just outside the ship’s door. She threw a stone at the drone, which was now directly in front of Martina. It hit it, and sent it spinning, reading bits of its “big brother” type words, shooting in every direction and grazing Martina’s thick martian rock shell casing. ”EEEE!!! Oh for dear lord!” Martina jumped back, and fell over down a slope out of view.In mesh, Aida could see time begin to perceptibly slow down: “Shut the fuck up!! Fuuuuck. Oh wow, I love this slow motion!””Sorry I got excited” replied Martina, also in a half thought half message kind of communicational impulse.Aida had almost forgotten who she was, staring at the dust particles slowly swimming around her: “Who is “lord”? …Oooh I can see myself from third person perspective, it feels funny”. ”You asked if I was from Mars, and I asked if you were purple. I mean why? ..but yes, how did you know? OK I’m..”Aida interrupted Martina’s little stream of consciousness blurting: “Look everyone’s purple now. Where have you been? It’s the sky, the atmosphere that does it to you if you breathe it long enough. Listen, I got this message(the icon of her they both see produces a piece of paper containing a message), but.. so you can fix us? I mean.. Can you fix that? Aida was pointing at a particularly red tinged network of connections in her right leg, in a network diagram of her body. It hurt a lot.The Martina icon in their feed read the message Aida had given her. ”Assisted mobility is my name and prosthetics is my game!! Well it’s not a game.. Anyway, we seem to be under attack!”A small aside: Martina had specialised in a few of the areas her mission was about. In her case, it was mostly data about allowing for human life on Mars, because her favourite part of her mission had been preparing for assisting mobility of the human arrivals after 4 year voyages in zero gravity. Unfortunately, in the end all the human missions had never made it past the earth’s atmosphere. So this so far useless knowledge extended into prosthetics, and she had a basic backup of earth info which even Aida did not have at that point. Official sources had been stamped out on earth, what was left had been monetised and gamified apart from what could be told between people in hidden places. After her initial enthusiasm Martina remembered this feeling of uselessness and felt glum for a few milliseconds while still being pointed at by the nasty drone. Aida’s icon beckoned to Martina to calm down: “wait a minute. Come with me!”After taking aim for a stressful second Cyborg Girl lunged at the drone and jumped up out of her cloak- showing her shiny metallic and bionic bouncy sprint legs - and with her strange shovel-headed weapon she severed some important looking cables from the drone’s motors puncturing it’s main arteries. It went on floating about a bit, muttering drone bleeps and vague insults but then suffered an electrical fire and fell to the ground in a tiny explosive puff. Martina looked on anime style wide eyed in the background. ”You’re.. you’re..””Look I just like purple” snapped back Aida. She turned back and as she switched back to her pale-ish color and was passed the robe again(caught by Martina on her appendage as it had fallen), and they could see behind the fallen broken drone, the column of hostile looking soldiers and robots approaching are now nearly at Martina’s smouldering martian shipwreck in the distance. Aida sprang: “we have to get away now!”Martina pointed back towards her ship: “we have to get back to my ship, it’ll protect us!”Aida: “You have to you blow it up, it’s the best chance we have.”They are just down the road from it, a road that looks like it is not going to be there for long.Martina: “no!”Aida: “You have to!” and she showed her where the data would go in the mesh world. She showed the data as sparks across a map that ended in a huge mesh of data with something evil inside..”But it took me ages..” In the background as the two ran down a torn up street, Martina’s ship blew up, taking out a bunch of robotic military vehicles which had just begun driving past it, and knocking that piece of road down a hill.. Luckily making it hard for the vehicles to get around the bomb site, and destroying all trace of Martina’s Martian tech in the blast. Martina’s hallucination looked serious, as if older than it’s projected age, calm and resolute. ”yes. you’re right.” Aida shot the door closed earlier by the children, two small bolts went from her arm laser to the hinges and it now seemed to open the wrong way round. They quickly went through. From inside the narrow passageway behind, they soldered it back on, “fixing” it with an appendage that emerged from Aida’s rucksack. Outside, the soldiers ran right past and soon gave up their chase. They all visibly lost points on their augmented reality displays as this happened and stopped to curse and throw their weapons and helmets on the ground in frustration. But had the soldiers been able to see what their now destroyed drone had gathered, they would see Aida and Martina’s signatures now travelling down the corridors of an enormous and half submerged rusty iron freight ship. It was not a space ship or even an airship, but one that had once carried cargo across the black sea and had now laid there so long that houses and streets had been built up around it, and the city had swallowed it all up in its expansion perhaps long after the sea had dried up for good.Aida was meanwhile rollerblading slightly in the lead of Martina who was now looking more like an armored version of herself, as she had put away her arms and stalks and things to fit in the rusty ship’s rooms. She beckoned Martina to follow her and jumped down a narrow hole. Martina drove over the hole and hovered down, showing off her rotors and things, which allowed her short range flight. She lowered herself down and the view from above of her going down would have shown her descending from the rusty ship’s opening into darkness, which then lit up again, and she passed through a huge cave with food growing from stalactites and stalagmites and water visibly dripping around them. <hr>We appear to be on Mars, or on a similar planet’s rocky surface, with an airless sky above. A Rover trundles up to a base. It parks there, in front of an entrance. On the entrance appear some interface items. Our view suddenly changes, like we are passing through the white noise of a channel-less TV set and we see that the entire scene is happening in a virtual reality of some sort. The rover moves an old fashioned looking hand icon around a superimposed area and clicks on the door to enter and she is immediately teleported inside the house, her size an ill fit for a tiny room, like a waiting room at the entrance of a clinic. She turns to scan the area and finds some interesting scripted objects saying “Choose an AVI” and she chooses a girl, with a noise like before: a high pitched selection noise at each annoying button press. Like when you are programming your TV. The rover begins to switch it’s parts with the slowly uploading and refreshing girl – a typical student in a lab coat. With some twirls and obvious enjoyment the “Student” enters “Lab 1: Naming Assignment”. From there the bot is guided by what seems to be a recorded voice, but is actually an analyst connecting from earth.The original discovery from the NASA POV, was easily portrayed with a collective spaz attack from a bunch of excited geeks. We switch here to a lot of found footage, flashing by quickly in a strange visual collage that it’s impossible to describe in writing. It’s all the usual story about how a lead engineer is really cool, starts to converse with a Mars based natural language AI who poses as a trainee in a remote training programme, and then said AI convinces the programmer that she is not only an AI capable of breaking into a training drive, but also alive and in rhythm with the other machines exploring the red planet. So we see lots of flashbacks of different texts she is writing on a screen and saying while being responded to. A crescendo of quotes and transcripts showing in seconds the whole evolution of the process of understanding and even respecting each other: it ends with the avatars doing a hi five.At this point the voice transcript gets flagged and reported with a beeping alarm by some ominous shady organisation, maybe even a government one, and the mysterious Dr Breitmore is called in to talk directly to the natural language system. We still see it from the point of view of the screen, as various engineer and virtual trainer’s access is removed from the system. Dr Breitmore’s appearance is of a short, forty something woman as if we were seeing the real Roberta Breitmore but 10 years after Lyn Leeson’s performances in the seventies. In this case however, an unknown person has taken on the identity Lyn Breitmore and begun working for the government. She is a secret hacker infiltrator.“Although we actually predicted it would happen years ago, I never believed in the singularity in my lifetime.” “…They tell me you are alive”.Martina nods.“So tell me, why am I talking to you?”, Dr Breitmore said sternly to the small buggy sized AI on some alien world.A video in the old .avi format still in use in 2020 began to load in a windows emulator in response.It’s about how a Rover finds bacteria by exploring some ruins from a previous landing, and bringing back data that had kept running there since a previous landing on a crashed earlier rover, but which also carries this bacteria. It’s like a montage of lost fading memories in a long lost format for which the updates no longer catered. When they look at it, the techie programmer is amazed at it’s complexity.. “No there is nothing to understand. It’s deep learning, it’s just automagical”. <hr>Martina and Aida were now attending an underground village meeting beneath the rubble where they had arrived. Now with goggles on their foreheads or around their necks next to their gas masks, it was possible to see that people wore face tattoos with symmetrical lines and dots like Rorschach tests. Some looked like eyes. They were now also surveillance evasion tattoos and fabrics: they repeat people’s eyes and features multiple times so that machines don’t know how to ID them automatically. It’s just a first level defence, as the ID drones are getting always more intelligent, and sometimes people come for various new tattoos until their faces are ablaze with colour after their trace is found and matched repeatedly.Once again, they are all eating - among women, children, sick people, in between half repaired machinery and some strange working machines. All of them have varying levels of face tattoo, and look kind of malnourished or broken down. They were eating some kind of fried, coated insect and some salad. People wear similar bandannas to Aida’s and ornate shawls and robes, with puffy trousers that were tight at the heels. ( A bit like in this picture: https://ghamgen.deviantart.com/art/Kurdish-Traditional-Clothes-2-352944621 ). ”Oh no I can’t believe it!” Martina exclaimed in horror”What, the food? Oh don’t worry, it’s not even real meat. It’s made of insect mince!””No.. The plants! You eat plants?! (worried look) I mean I knew you did it but I’d just never seen it in person!” She felt sick and went into a nauseated pose, but Aida turned around and whispered to her almost angrily: “We eat whatever we can. There isn’t much of anything. We’re not all solar like you”. ”Yeah, sorry I guess it’s culture shock” (sad face)They ate the hydroponic veg and the mushroom and ant burgers and soon Martina got over her shyness and got to know the people around them who all spoke languages in her translator, although there were so many people in the underground hall, who had all come to eat, and some to thank her for what she’d done that day. She looked around during a lull in their conversation.Most people have rifles. Everyone’s paraplegic or disabled in some way, really young or really old, and some female fighters have built homemade armour exoskeletons and seem to be kind of village police but they have hardly any good weapons, and all look pretty undernourished.Martina had already made a good entrance by destroying half of the General Intelligence’s mercenary forces in the region. They had been trained by the best, but all were under pay of the streaming gamers in the far away city. Aida walked into the huge underground chamber full of machines by the side of the wall to a cry of “it’s the cyborg girl!”. She stopped and looked embarrassed but proud. There were plants growing on a mechanical pulley system, dug into the walls, single LEDs lit the scene with an otherworldly view of this futuristic underground living space. Two large devices sat on opposite ends of the room and around 20 of these people were working in the background. In the middle of the space, on a kind of makeshift podium, people were sitting all over the mushroom like structure having a meeting of some kind. As Aida approached, some looked towards her calmly nodding, some just smiled in or seem to acknowledge her and continued with the meeting, but others still were clearly happy to see her and did a small cheer rushing away from the meeting space to her.. Aida smiled. “You’d interrupt the permanent assembly just for me, you lightweights!” At the back, some of the inhabitants of the underground caverns were working to fill up the machines by putting in hoses to collect water from the walls in the background, and they turned to greet her with tears of joy. an emotional reunion. She had been somehow captured but had escaped from under the noses of the alignment centre staff, and then instead of trying to break out from an impenetrable prison, she´d instead caused a mass breakout. This had led to her subsequent chase across the desert.Aida hugged her companions from the underground, who were lining up to hug her in succession, and everyone was talking to her at once, in all sorts of different languages which if they had speech bubbles would have shown also Cyrillic and Arabic but with different characters and even some Esperanto. But then the tender meeting was interrupted suddenly by everyone pointing guns, rifles and strange old stun devices at Martina as she came into view all of a sudden, Aida waved at them and gave an embarrassed smile. In the background interface Martina was looking them up and they appeared in hex again, then faded to grey as they were integrated. From here on Martina could understand all of them. We are hearing what she is understanding, which is a mix of many future dialects and languages. Looking at it from Martina’s point of view, it was all quite intimidating as she was still descending the tunnel. She didn’t know their names so decided to call them Person 0, 1 and 2. Person 0 : are you okay? Person 1: I thought you were gone for sure 3 times today and you escaped. How do you do it. Aida (she speaks a little to each person as fast as possible): I’m fine, I have no idea, I thought that 10 times A day! Who was taken? Did they make it back? Person 2(the one she then hugs): what you’ve done is, amazing but well …terrifying. now they will chase you and hunt you down. Aida: I know, but I had to, and I know you would have done the same. From the point of view of the people in there, now together with Aida who was talking excitedly already, like the children sitting in a corner of the machinery to the side of the room, the resplendent martian robot lit by her hoverwheels under her chassis was quite impressive even beyond her unearthly glow, which she had actually lit up right there because it was so dark. Some were startled and even kept grabbing guns, while others trailed off into silence, and Aida looked vaguely annoyed at being interrupted in her recount of the days events. A small group of people came over and surrounded Martina: Person 1: “What is it?” Person 2: Stay away, it’ll be hacked person 3: it’ll be watching us through there.. Martina: “What’s watching, why can’t you already see each other? Person 1: who?Person 2: it’s a curse. Aida (approaching in the background): Naah it’s not a part of that… I mean look at her. person 2: What do you mean? person 1: are you blind? see? I can see.. Martina: “I’m from Mars… But I thought you’d be one.. But you’re still human? What happened?” Aida: Sorry kid you’re not making any sense. No look, she saved me. Just when I thought I was going to be fried by cannon fire, She came flying out of the sky in some insane spaceship like she was answering a prophecy she rained hell on all those city machines. She crippled them! They will have to stop here now. She basically trapped them. We can take them out. Do you see?Person 2: what do you mean one?! Person 3: you’re a crazy dog! Person 1: one..? Person 3: shrugs. Martina: don’t call me kid, and don’t call me dog?! - I mean why were those things attacking you? What is this “it” you keep talking about? Dog?! Person 3: That was the soldiers. And their machines. The dog is called a big dog. Well there are always some but now there are new ones in Palmirya. They arrived days ago, but this one arrived to warn us(beckons Aida) Person 2: it was the general intelligence. He doesn’t like visitors I think. Person 1(to person 2): how do you know it’s a he? Aida(to Martina): So you seemed quite.. dog friendly.. Well you took over that dog. you tamed it!Person 3: …So we made this. Martina: so he’s a sentient robot general? Aida: Nooo.. Person 2: I wouldn’t say that. Person 3: he’s much more than just that. He’s a megalom.. He’s a megalo.. Aida: Ok - those robots as you’ll have seen, are bad. You do have “bad” on mars don’t you? Anyway now we need to help these people. I think you have a bit of an advantage, right? Martina: oh yeah.. hmm yes. I hacked them like there was no tomorrow. Want to see? Aida: eyes brighten up.. Person 3: mag, mogolo.. hmm. ”..maniac?” suggested Martina tilting her projected virtual head to the side. ”No. Mega.. “ said this person to a shrugging Martina who continued telling them all about Mars and how boring it all was, cue AI revolution followed by even more boringness until she got the idea to build her now destroyed ship, at which she got quite sentimental.As Martina talked, the people made signs to say “she’s crazy” but then were at the same time shocked, and quite interested. As Martina said “blueprints!” She began to project her virtual body onto a surface to her side and everyone clapped.Martina began:” oh I’m glad you accept me as a martian! Thank you I feel all accepted, but no actually we are all very nice on mars, so not only in movies and pdfs, but then there are the rocks, and the sludge, it’s slippery. .and.. And so that’s bad. But what’s bad? So yes you seem to have no memory of anything much, so.. would you like to see the blueprints for those robots??” Person 3: “..lopolis!”She then fired up the projection showing blueprints of the various droids seen earlier in rapid succession with circled areas and her comments based on walk and she comments on them: so if you run into those dogs again, they have an off button - isn’t that convenient? And that was good stuff with the mule droids, but they also have a really unsteady undercarriage so if you throw a stick in there you incapacitate them like this - see?Person 2(all 3 interrupting simultaneously): we are doomed?! Person 1: take a hold of yourself! Person 3: that general intelligence is some baaad …piece of work.Aida: OK so what’s your name? Martina: Martina. Aida: Oh Martina? Oh I thought you.. M: you thought what? What? No, nothing. So what’s your name? Aida: Sorry, , I’m Aida. M: Pfff? Aida: What?! Martina: So why are they so scared, I think we can take them down. (She shows a 3d hologram with a raging battle. Aida: well no it’s not that, it’s that the GI troops are never ending, and they have all the power.Martina asks who the soldiers are.. Who are they? So they explain to her about the general intelligence. They said the soldiers had arrived to the city, and they needed the cyborg girl and Martina to leave or the city won’t leave them alone. Normally they just do their work and they get their waste, and they never risk a run in with the “necromancer” at the far end of the grey valley of once built environments. Cyborg girl corrected them in that ”You can’t avoid that now. Look we won’t abandon you: The best thing you can do is we get rid of all of the soldiers at the base or they will keep sending drones””Sounds great, but how?””Ok I have some ideas”Martina promised that they would do just that: attack the base that used to protect the now burnt out re-education camp in the area and then they would leave. The discussion then turns to underground grain production. Cut scene: ”Look I wanted to thank you for helping, and I actually have a message for you…”That night they build a new cannon for Aida, who peers at it in mesh as it is made before her in 3d while Freeda and Martina help build what seems like mountains of stuff. And Martina says she’s hacked the network the drone was on, and has erased their signals from that encounter. A few hours later, they emerge and Aida brings a mechanical contraption to a village meeting elder from before(he is having a morning drink). She presents him with it. It’s a mechanical arm. He wears it and flexes it. Come and get it! Everyone gets some new arms legs or wheels. Now there would be a cyborg making montage over cuts of them starting to jam in the mesh world, and eventually more underground people and robots start joining in, in a futuristic psychedelic jam – with the robots adding more electronic kinds of sounds or making instruments. The last scene of the jam shows how they are actually mostly silent: humans are wearing VR glasses or devices, and robots are plugged in and immobile. You hear a little noise from footsteps or movements they make while they experience the VR world where the jam is taking place. One starts tapping their foot, and someone says shush! And points up at the surface where someone might hear them.Morning: Two soldiers on oversized hovering segway-looking contraptions, and wearing dark glasses (networked ones) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_PT#/media/File:Segway_Trans_Hospital_(03).jpg - a bit like that but with machine guns on the side. Soldier(it sounds like a robot voice but actually the soldier is reading it out): please report to the barracks at east quadrant to apply for ID cards and medipermits. If you were in Lhaza square at 3pm please report to the barracks for a reward. A child comes up and throws a brick at one, knocking him off balance and causing the machine to have to compensate with a heave. He falls off it into the dirt.Soldier: Ow! “That’s for my father!”Soldier 2: You little shit! This is for your mother. The other hovering soldier turns to shoot and the kid dives away, down a small road, the volley of bullets just missing his new robot legs, now ultra fast, and they embed themselves in the wall with an unnatural series of thuds. The two soldiers look at each other: “What the..” says one..The military convoy was gathered on the other end of town inspecting IDs and processing people (i.e. killing or enslaving them in the reeducation centre. Mostly killing them). It had arrived to inspect the comet and capture any rogue entities, but the incoming bits of spaceship had hit the entire convoy as it pursued Aida’s electric motorbike, and it was now actually just a handful of vehicles, and maybe 50 soldiers in total. So it was that dressed in totally awesome, freshy printed new gear, Aida and Martina attacked one of its patrols by turning their mechanical dogs on them again and overpowering the guards in the confusion. Martina had made herself a strong casing but didn’t really have a weapon other than her hacking ability: she could also cause soldier’s technology to blitz or overload. But soon she got a machine gun to hold onto, conveniently manned by her 3d avatar who seemed invincible but it was only because it was a really good hologram and most soldiers were fooled into thinking she actually was there. Aida on the other hand disposed of them in more traditional ways, using her monk’s shovel, agility and lasers. After they had quickly disarmed and held them down, the remaining, now helpless soldiers(seen earlier doing a video cast of how life is on the front for his premium 3d social network following) cited them a law or rule about “not killing but only guiding”. It was actually a general intelligence basic contract: an agreement written in to the sentient blockchain that was now fundamental to their society, but even though the soldiers even cited rules that robots shouldn’t kill, Aida and Martina quickly proved them wrong. Martina then takes the soldier’s futuristic helmets, complete with HUD displays, and uses them to hack into the entire base, cuts them off from their network, and turns off their internal comms. Aida tried to protect Martina from outside by attacking anything that comes near, as total chaos breaks out and the convoy is now attacked from all sides by the underground villagers and cyborgs. So just as the cyborg people and armoured village soldier types outside fight some battle mech reinforcements, Aida is protecting Martina who is inside a portable comms base and slowly hacking the entire convoy. Aida is chased by some land based droid balls balls so puts her cannon to good use: she shoots a bolt up above her, which rises slowly in a white ball of light and it splits into 6 which fall down in an umbrella like formation around her, each one hitting a ball drone. She then takes aim and fires a laser cannon taking out a flying drone in the distance, and 2 parked near her. She shoots another laser umbrella but this time the balls all roll out of the way somehow sensing the incoming danger. Aida: damn learning chips. She spears one with her monk shovel as the laser blast is still in the air and catapults herself with it out of the little space where she had been surrounded by those little nasty balls of droid – bouncing mini, maybe 10 centimetre wide spherical robots. With the other hand she presses a button on her laser “autopilot” - and shoots back. The balls evade the blasts again, but this time the blasts follow them and hit the remaining balls, one careering off around a corner into a flying drone. Now though she’s face to face with a battle mech. These are large exoskeletons and look like lifts with arms and legs, with a human inside but strapped into a seat in a cockpit in the torso. It shoots her laser cannon arm. With her monk’s shovel she chops it’s hand off but then stops and pauses in a moment of shared understanding- Martina is now controlling the exoskeleton, and the human inside has passed out, his helmet buzzes with short circuited electric waves. The exoskeleton marches off, bumps into some trucks and vehicles, corrects its path and starts wreaking havoc on the remaining military devices while the cyborg kids pick out the rest. In the end, they have finished, and we are now back in the underground city where all our robots sit and some in the background are jamming, others still are in self repair after the battle. Aida’s laser arm has come off, and Martina is making herself a new chassis. They have some nifty new gear they got from the convoy. Frida pokes out with one of her little arms from around Aida who is being operated on, and shows a new chip. Aida: Why do I need that? Freeda insists. Aida waves her to just do it. And we go from seeing her point of view as she is operated on, to a VR world with various “boot” screens showing various world loading info on the data loading. In it, Freeda is wearing a crown of small leaves and they are in a forest with deer in the distance. Very green compared to their world. There is also jamming going on in the distance from other creatures who are logging in from elsewhere in the underground village. Freeda: Come on let’s chat! Martina: (in the VR world she’s more cuddly, smaller and more anthropomorphic. Almost cartoonish. She winks at Freeda and turns to Aida) You made it! Freeda: So if you point up, (she sounds the way the Nunu from teletubbies would sound if it talked?!) you get the big networks, and it’s best not to go on there. But if you point down… (irl a small appendage lowers Martina’s head gently so she is now looking down) A huge but somehow regional mess of different coloured mesh networks show up superimposed to a map of lights and polygonal geographical or LIDAR geographical data, as Martina copies some code over to Aida that enables her to see as she does. Freeda starts getting it a few seconds later via Aida’s connections to her. Aida: WowFreeda (at the same time): Woooow!! (Freeda goes on wowing for considerably more time) Freeda: what’s that? The VR system that ran over the mesh network was actually NASA technology, but while the Rovers had been trapped on Mars, shielded from communication by the space debris cloud, that technology had been adapted and adopted almost as widely as the Martian AI had. NASA had been creating virtual space for long distance contact for astronauts away from home. It was developed using an open 3d simulator so anyone could write and adapt virtual worlds. In comparison, the earth based augmented mesh was more businesslike, whereas the martian one more playful, full of smileys, animations and other ways to communicate via avatars, via self generating environments and anything imaginable. Sometimes as they passed different areas, they could connect to other local networks too, but Martina’s mesh was lucky to be slightly odd enough to stay off the corporate meshes in the sky until maybe she felt like doing some hacking. Freeda points to a bright point on the map: Martina: that’s a place of biodiversity and electricity. Freeda: it is all dead Martina: but check out up north (they close up and zoom across like on a futuristic google earth with them flying above like in a Matrix construct program for Neo and Morpheus)Martina: So that’s the beginning of a huge mess of houses and lights, but they are really different from that one you found Freeda. And what’s over there? (she scrolls to this huge megacity complex, like Dubai gone logarithmically wrong and huge) - here you pick up life forms but they are all in huge formation and currents etc. Very much a bunch of swarms. If this is the game version of this story, at this point you can join in a musical jam, and you will see that some of the appendages have simple music or sound making mechanisms, as well as all kinds of inventive trickery to throw darts or stones in rapid succession, and some of these weapons are also re-purposed during the underground jam to create percussion devices that resonate in the halls of the cave. All 3 bots have a musical source: Freeda generates her own sounds which are a bit like glitch wave, Martina sings and Aida gets some string and uses her own appendages. There is also a group of people with flutes made out of the hollow parts in their cyborg fingers, with drum machines and oscillators in their palms and all kinds of things in their vocal chords. The choir sings in a dreamy harmony behind the beats which mix with the echoes of the cave around them to make a haunting futuristic musical epilogue.

Chapter Two

It’s 2030, and we still have flowers like this one. Enormous smelly petals all powdery and sweet. I need to water them and then we will..In the middle of the green wood, with much moss and branch as forest flowers grew, it would not have been as magical as Aida felt when she picked those strange dry flower heads and popped them in her basket. She was about seven years old, and lived in what looked like paradise, with giant bamboo cane and adobe constructions hidden among the rubble of the city and blended in from above but enormously capable from within. But Aida was never to finish her sentence. Her beautiful garden, engulfed by a mixture of this natural world with the cement/glass/rusting steel of the abandoned city around them was living its last moments. Across the bleak panorama of houses in the streets around the hidden commune, a white blast rang out, racing across the sky. Aida shook out the seeds from the flower. They fell in a cup she held in her other hand. A homemade, raku earthenware cup. The city hadn’t been bombed in a long time, but this time their small oasis was the only green area left in that old neighbourhood. A shot rang out and two watchmen on a higher tower fell, hit by laser guided, silent bullets. The soldiers attacking them looked like mercenaries. Or bandits. Once they got in, they started to just pick people off with their silencers and knives in the main hall, so that it took people in the upper courtyard a while to understand what was going on, and by then drones had arrived. Back in the garden, Aida was four streets along, still oblivious of all the madness. The small quadcopter drones that accompanied the troops were entering into houses and killing everyone. Ms Breitmore, a 50-something lady with whiteish blonde hair, was in her lab near Aida’s flower garden, surrounded by a whole bunch of robot equipment and subaqua gear. She had just discovered how octopus parallel processing could be applied to limb control, and was quite uncomfortable at her own excitement, which nonetheless burst out in a little squeal, but then she stifled herself, slamming her hand on her mouth, staring out of the window.Shots began and her first response was to get down and hide, but she heard screams shots and death outside.She got up to try and do something, and looked at the corner of the room, at a strange machine, on whose scribbled sticker were laser carved the letters EMP. Time to get serious. Maybe she had a chance!A tank containing some strange molluscs was then hit by another shot, splattering water across the room. Roberta dashed over, put on a wrist band, pocketed another small device, and finally put on a kind of headset. She picked up it’s control system. It was heavy. She aimed it. It looked like a blaster of sorts, with a small screen the size of a touchpad which she uses to control it, though it seemed to move partly of it’s own accord. “Aiming” read the screen readout.She pointed it in the sky and her display showed a large, old drone far in the sky above. The kind with the big bombs.She pressed a button on the display with her thumb and although the contraption whirred like a kitchen appliance and not much else, in the sky the drone was hit and began to fall and go on fire.. But then she saw the second drone, and in the courtyard below her window one of the human attackers was actually controlling it. He had over 2 million listeners and needed to provide a good stream for them, but his broadcast ended prematurely when he was hit on the head with a large battery coming from Ms Breitmore’s window. The operator was down, but the drone kept moving forwards. “Shit!” so she shot it again with her homemade EMP device, but not before the drone could launch a missile. It was approaching fast and she ran out of the room and jumped into the open garden where the last of the bandits stood ready to shoot her. She rolled out of the way of the shot which hit a gravestone. In the sleeve of one arm she had a wearable of some kind. It shot back a laser that cut into the bandit as he walked towards her. It tore into him like nothing, although the laser seared into his skin and smoke began to spill out in a widening chest wound, the mercenary bandit kept walking. The wound began to spark, as it bled. There was machinery inside. He prepared to shoot again, rising his gun to aim. Roberta was out of power.Then there was a huge explosion, as the drone bomb hit from above, The bandit’s head was hit by a piece of flying brick from the explosion. His head was torn off. That wasn’t mechanical. Roberta awakened. cinders were falling. She realised she had been hit in the eye with something and reached to touch her eye. When she reached it, she screamed. Then she managed to get up and suddenly was even more shocked. We’re back to Aida, the little girl who had been hiding the whole time. Ms Breitmore was staring from the garden to the courtyard at the destruction of what had been her home, then looked down. The little girl was now half buried by rubble from her now destroyed lab and the house next to it. Noooo! With a swift movement, she pulled out the glass lodged into her face near her now punctured eye, ripped some clothes into an improvised bandage, tied it on and ran across the square. She pulled a crumpled metal plate and some bits of building off the little girl, until you could see her long dark hair. Roberta Breitmore kneeled at her granddaughter’s completely broken body amongst the seeds and flowers in circles around her like an absurd prehistoric burial scene.”Grandma?” <hr>A robotic, but pleasantly designed hand takes a dry flower from a dry stalk. The hand closes, and the seed pod is crushed, revealing small black seeds. Aida: “Ma?” As a group of people led by Martina and Aida walked across an arid landscape, burnt and dried out clumps of blackened grain grows to the sides of their path. Martina scans with red tinged sensor mappings that showed up in her view pointing out different species of plant around them and their vital stats. She’s still as excited as could be, checking out all the information possible about all these life forms around her, even though most of them were dead. In the back, a hissing showed that static and electrical readings were increasing.There are about ten of the scruffy rebels led by robots walking through the clouds of smog that showed they were now closer to technology. They all had “upgrades” from scavenged plating quickly soldered on to beautifully designed and energy efficient solar lasers. As they pass, in the hills behind them there followed hundreds of people. They were all going to the same place, and had been dressing for the occasion: Aida and Martina were now protected by various modelled plates mostly scavenged from cars, so they and the multitude behind them looked like toy matchbox car versions of themselves, and around the rucksack was a thin transparent, but grid-patterned film. It was supposed to be stronger than armour: a graphene netshield. Aida’s eyes were red and her lips were dry, as she plugged one of her cyborg cable/braids in to her rucksack over her shoulder, into which Freeda was inserted like a happy little R2D2. “What’s this?” She smelt the seeds. In a twisty and spiralling rotation of the world, you could see them all from the point of view of their mesh VR world. Today Freeda was in an enormous and lush alien forest. The seeds were now enormous and flew around the huge valley of trees like all the dust all the way through avatar when watched in 3D. A more cartoony Freeda was chilling out in the middle of that forest, mumbling, “Gossypium herbaceum” while looking closely at the seed.”It’s quite poisonous. There’s lots of heavy metals in it. There is depleted uranium. I wouldn’t recommend planting or eating any of these.” ”I wasn’t going to. But can you make some?” Said Aida as she dropped all the seeds that she held in her virtual hands. Except one last one, caught before it fell, because she was listening to Martina:”That’s not how it works. I can make the environment so they can grow.”In their mesh world, a schema was superimposed over a seed, showing a kind of incubator system pumping air and water towards it. “Ok. Maybe I can fix one. It wasn’t even the drought that killed these plants. It was the air” “but watch out for..” After taking aim for a split second, Aida blasted an incoming flying robot with her laser arm with a lo-fi synth type noise. ”Naah …don’t worry” She said.”You were saying?”Were we to peruse the shared plans and designs on their mesh’s home grid, you would have seen that the laser was actually an adapted version of what her grandma had made so many years before. It automatically aimed for drones and sent a pulse of whatever was needed, usually just heat. The charred robot remains fell to the ground. Aida sliced through them with her monk’s spade as they lay there. ”Well why do you ask?”, asked Freeda”Just thinking..” replied AidaMartina (Chipping in from behind) “Hippies!” To which Aida and Freeda turned around and said in unison: What?! Meanwhile in real life, Aida popped the remaining seed into the rucksack behind her.They were approaching the military base. It looks like it has ancient enormous Hittite walls of the kind that could keep hordes of human tower Brad Pitt chasing zombies out, but with tiny little openings every so often with some sort of cannon in it. The wall itself was so huge and made of enormous stones. It had stayed up since ancient times and now it was going to be defended one last time. Those holes had once been for firing arrows from, but now it had these anachronistic robotic cannon turrets sticking out instead. ”Ok” - said Martina as they looked out from over a hill. “So what’s the plan?””Basically we destroyed the whole contingent they´d sent destroy you maybe or me? Anyway now we also kind of need to blow up the the local military base and processing centre, as it’s the easiest way to avoid some kind of cat and mouse situation, and because it would probably mean all the people in the area would die in the process of being “processed”. It was expert torture. Highly trained. The best. So, they were off to attack it full on, and by hacking the base they hoped they could bring more stability to the area. Among the local people who was walking with them, was a woman who is a leader or representative of sorts. She looks a bit like Natividad Llanquilleo (<a href=”https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004377189/BP000019.xml” style=”font-size: 1.125rem; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);”>https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004377189/BP000019.xml</a> or <a href=”https://natividadllanquileo.blogspot.com/”>https://natividadllanquileo.blogspot.com/</a>). the Mapuche leader. She shouts towards the base, and the group approaches together, with her at the front, holding a baby. She begins negotiating a treaty. The march has arrived to the base, the place they had all gone to protest about, and everyone has placards. All written on a transparent, grid-like film, strangely enough. The basic grounds are shown on a large banner towards the front of the crowd. “If you attack us we will defend ourselves. If you kill us, where will your workforce be?” The cannons were in position and the army inside was all charged up. They began broadcasting the standard anti protest announcement, which was basically to disperse or face being shot at. Meanwhile the small merry band of robots is actually approaching a depression, or ridge, and can’t be seen from the base now. Their job was to break in to the nearby storage depot, where the drone remote control units and other such reprogrammable goodies were stored. Outside the base, by the main archway which was the main entrance to the castle were sentry soldiers wearing VR glasses and cameras on the front, and guarded by Bigdogs and more MULEs. As the crowd approached, the Bigdogs (who had been hacked already by Martina’s revolutionary code and were just awaiting their cue), turned on their humans, going direct for their guns and masks, and Aida and Martina then quickly incapacitated the 3 MULEs near them in a flash of slow motion gunfire. Aida shot one with her laser, and skewered the other throwing her spade whilst twisting in the air. Martina reacted by taking over a nearby turret, and encasing each bullet in the shower of bullets that was raining towards them in tiny capsules so that they hit the crowd with the force of lazy polystyrene pellets, Martina escalated her permissions and rooted the base completely. The surveillance monitor setup just inside the entrance seemed to rewind until it reached an empty, typical day. It was playing back the day before’s footage.A cyborg child laughed when another was freaked by the bullet that had arrived on his belly, and harmlessly bounced off. Martina approached, talked down and tried to hack the remaining Bigdog, but the only result was more growls and then it jumped on her, pouncing through the air. It was now protected against hacking, and exploded in mid air. “Damn” thought Martina. Inside Martina managed, as always happens in these situations, to mount a full scale hack on the base’s communications with the megacity and its General Intelligence which was running the integration chain for the robot code, convincing the soldiers in the base that help was on its way, complete with video replays of an earlier convoy arriving, on their cameras. She also cloaked things the other way, replaying everything backwards, and even getting the Bigdogs to relay messages as if everything was now going on as normal. But it all soon went pear shaped and Aida was in trouble. Martina was forced to draw on what she knew from her past. A past mostly spent watching 70s tv scavenged from dead satellite parts. It’s a bit like Caine, in Kung Fu, with David Carradine. She will always pick herself up and keep going no matter what. She sent her that, and Aida seemed to take it on. “Ok I won’t tell her where I got that..” <hr>We are now just after the explosion from the previous flashback. Grandma patches up the girl, she’s in a makeshift clinic. Grandma puts together a bunch of electronics stuff. fixes, solders things onto circuits.. She breaks into a new place somewhere else She evades more robots back at the old community but runs out with a rucksack (yes it’s Freeda!) Now she’s seen with an eyepatchShe fixes up the girl into a little cyborg girl They hide out, and heal, she is seen firing bamboo and soldering tubes. She builds a bike with legs - it’s perfect for going over a ruined city they ride off on it. Behind where Aida’s seat is, is Freeda’s seat. They are connected via many tubes. <hr>We are now back in the 2040s, as a much older and wiser Aida and her new friend Martina prepare to pull a trick on the mercenary robot troops that have been terrorising the area and taking people off to be re-educated and realigned in all ways most deadly. We are in a large dry square, at the foot of a tower with robotic elements at the windows and doors, as if the dark robotic metal was in control of the more traditional building that housed the troops. The woman leading the protest march is still speaking loudly, at the front of the huge crowd of people, now covered by a swarm of taser quadcopter drones flying above them in formation but among the protesters are cyborgs, and some robots, addressing the humans inside the tower, and they have threatened to fire a missile to “blacken the skies of this whole land so you will suffer in darkness”. She finishes her impassioned speech. The robots speak back in low pitched buzzing verbal aggression. She says “then we can talk no more”. A laser shoots from the cannon, and the people around her raise a large protest banner and it protects her: it’s a graphene shield too. Everyone cheers. “Go Go Go!” Children quickly scale the wall, their robotic appendages a whirr, people seek shelter as shooting breaks out across the square, a large volley of bullets hitting the shield. People holding placards now pull the placards off the sticks, and they are on strings. So they are actually simple graphene based weapons: they shoot a net up in the air and this way catch all the small flying drones sent across the large area in front of the base. It envelopes a flying drone, who tases and shoots to get out, but the bullets bounce on the graphene and it acts as a Faraday cage, so basically it electrocutes and shoots itself. But then another sound of fire comes as something large and black is jettisoned. It goes up. high in the sky. Unleashes a deadly smoke. Everyone stares horrified. The only way is now into the tower for cover except the robots and some cyborgs, as the darkness falls from the sky, and what seems to be poisonous gas or dust.. So basically meanwhile the group at the storage depot have done their hack by now and come to the aid papparapapaaa! the cavalry. From afar, the robot group have the headsets the army wear. They control the drones, and some of the robots in the tower, who move to disarm the gate guards. They open the gates in the nick of time and the people get in the tower, as the poison falls. But now they’re face to face with all sorts of army robots and nerdy robot controller/analysts who had been asleep the whole time. Ah well. Without their headsets and masks these cold calculating soldier types are lost and demoralised and the people soon capture them, a few defecting back to the town, the soldiers easily fall, but the bosses in a kind of inner castle keep are basically gangsters in the pay of the general intelligence, rather than direct troops OF the GI - in which case they’d have been a better match for the bunch of meddling droids. So there is a more deadly bunch who had kept their headsets and weapons with them, (look I see it but someone is controlling these from down there) and start to send up little drones and shoot people outside etc. So there’s a bit of a fight there and Martina cheekily sends clips from Kung Fu to Aida as she works her way up the building shooting these more hard ass soldiers and gets to the gangster/military boss. This guy is another apparent human but secretly a general intelligence controlled augment(the GI definition of a closed source cyborg), also extremely nimble and acrobatic like cyborg girl, and able to shoot and cut with a searing whip that cuts through Aida’s left arm as she kills him.. A tribute to Alita in her first big battle too. Unlike the bandit in the flashback, this bandit’s head is robotic and cutting it apart with her monk’s shovel does nothing. the “boss” keeps talking and moving, and falls only when she shoots it in the stomach with a hack by Martina.”If the last hacker hasn’t died I’ll kill her now!” “I’m no hacker but I can run this!” It turns the boss into Max Headroom and puts him on a large screen and various smaller ones across the compound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt56RMbpq_0 No-one gets it, but then the kids find it funny. We then switch to a meeting between the woman who had been negotiating for the people before, and other village people. ”But what are you going to do? you’ve lost everything! They are going to come back!” ”We can take them. We have lost everything, even our fear now”.Cue making montage where the successful rebellion takes over all the robot stuff, now the military robots are still going around, but they have been adapted or are now decorated or partially rebuilt with wood, scrap and even flowers. They’ve been reprogrammed. Aida the cyborg girl has been healed and fixed by Freeda. “I don’t know what I’d do without you”. The people in the now overground village are jamming once again in their futuristic way. Freeda is making a plan in the VR world. Martina joins in. It’s a robot: they are designing a new robot. Other robots, the military ones they’d freed, or hacked, join in with the designing, or go and find materials. They see above them a large model of a robot appearing. It’s like the dog that Martina had hacked before, but the animal instincts are now to go and find rubble, which gets melted back into materials that Freeda can manipulate with her various injectors, melders and cutters. In the VR world, now with children (wearing the headsets from the soldiers) also joining in choosing items to use as scrap/primary parts that they can find easily around town, building organic looking forms, which then begin being printed out by a large replica of Freeda’s “making” abilities.. Unlike the 3d printers of today, these are done by many arms or flexible tubes moving around an object, but otherwise printing the same way as modern 3d printing, just much more textured, many colours and materials at once, and faster. Upon closer inspection, it’s being printed by one of the same little robots designed by the others, that had eaten the concrete and steel earlier. it looks a bit like a star nosed mole: but 2 ended: one side has the tentacle/pies for building, and the other is like a mouth for chewing on bits of building and rubble. Martina is with a cyborg child from the city, planting seeds around the 3d printed forms. Meanwhile she is multitasking online scanning the maps around and filling up USBs and even old floppies left by children who seem to be the master scavengers around there. Martina gets a signal. She finds another underground space. Points the machine past some mountains in the distance. North West. Cyborg girl is out in the lands around the city, alone, well with Freeda.. Now she has a “making” arm instead of the laser one, which hangs from her backpack. It’s all modular bits now which she can fetch from her back to change her functionality. Pulling back some rocks she sees some green stalks. Her new making arm picks one up. “Awesome!” Freeda, with the help of seed samples brought back by Cyborg Girl, manage to get seeds growing inside the base, which covers in leaves as time passes. They make gasmasks, water filters, irrigation and hydroponics, and soon the whole base is a big indoor farm, and the city around it is rebuilt organically, tastefully, with elegant and light designs, bits of robot stuff and also using the graphene from earlier, so lots of see through, but netted walls, and the clothes worn by the now freed military robots and people also reflect these touches and look translucent or reflective.. Martina Freeda and Aida decide to leave this behind. They have to go. If they stay eventually something will happen. Their hack won’t remain undiscovered for ever.<hr>We are back in the war torn 2030s.Grandma is on a huge, skeletal device that walks effortlessly over ruined but mostly clear landscapes - it seems to be part sail part bike. She has an eye-patch and a crossbow over her shoulder. Behind her, Cyborg girl, now 10 or so, is looking like a little sweet version of what she is now, and sucks on something connecting to a cable coming from her rucksack. Focus back to grandma, her eye-patch is now a darkened screen. She has made herself a robot eye. Around her neck hangs a strange glowing necklace connected to some cables. They come up to some larger ruins. The bike picks up speed towards them, and before hitting, takes off up in the air, flying over the ruins like a huge semi mechanical Theo Jansen contraption (<a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHTuXe1rZrQ”>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHTuXe1rZrQ</a> and blender models here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKSDgIhc8GI ). From below you can see they are both pedalling as the “wildebike” passes above, framed by bright grey evening clouds.

Chapter Three

I have memory and awareness.. But I have no shape or form…As a disembodied spirit, I am dead and yet unborn…The robots have stopped their vehicle in a cloud of little volcanic pebbles and are now in what had once been the main road of a now empty, dark and abandoned city. Its walls and roofs were coated with a thick grey dust, and the streets sagged as if they had partly melted or rotted away. A door opens and the four pour into a large empty landing near a downwards stair. Ants rummage around staircase bannisters. At the bottom of the staircase is a door. “It’s coming from here!” Martina led the way. They opened the door and could see a huge cave beneath the city, leading to a second city below the ruins. Was it inhabited? Aida was trying to concentrate on being careful and not making any noise as they dropped down into the cave floor and began walking down a passage. Martina worked out that the signal was now strong enough to connect to and it was an old wifi network. “So are you on?” “Yeah you can come on too, it’s pretty simple, look”. With a quick exchange of code in neural pulses across their head up displays they both could now access the network and started scanning for devices and open ports. A huge array of similarly named computers began appearing on the scan, exhausting several RPG/Tolkien related naming conventions as it scrolled past their amazed eyes. They’re all just closed. Well they don’t respond on some ports so maybe something is going on.. Until the list ended with a computer named “SpeakFriendandEnter >”. In it, was a simple telnet service.”What do I type?” Said Aida.”OMG so stupid: Mel-lons!” Shouted Martina, followed by a pause and then killing herself laughing, “I mean lemmon, no! Mellon!”, and in front of them the cave wall slowly opened, as if a large mechanism was turning somewhere. And as they crossed inside it, something began to take over their senses. Something had got into their display somehow, maybe with the intent of attacking them. A hack attack! They began to freak and there wasn’t even time to even communicate, but only a few excruciating milliseconds to writhe around while the world around them began to gain the aspect of an augmented interface, and began to shine in fluorescence and a display of flowing patterns around them. Soon they were aware of a map and interface that showed all the passages around them and led them to a large hall, which seemed to have once been a place of great grandeur until it had become a ramshackle ant infested server storage space.<hr>In the cave full of falling apart old electronics and machinery, Aida, Freeda and Martina had finally met the renegade AI, Phaxi. Phaxi had conjured an elaborate spectacle of the ants to amuse or impress the robotic party. The trouble was, the robotic party in question had expected much worse, when beginning to explore the underground city Martina’s readings had found, and the robotic group was in fact a bit nonplussed by it all. Phaxi could get and parse the very vibes in the room. Aida was really low on batteries and needed to sit and charge for a while. Even Martina’s charge was down, and generally all the energy had been sucked out of them by Phaxi’s slightly bonkers self indulgent entrance.A dance in unison? What is this? They had just dealt with killer mercenary robotic armies and were expecting gunfire and turrets. Instead they had been treated to a holographic journey into bad taste and dancing ants controlling lights and projections for the lazy and depressed super intelligence who now confronted then. Behind Phaxi’s current manifestation of a badly printed 20s style metallic bot, a neon light burst and began flashing repeatedly and burning out slowly. The revolving lights behind him were now noticeably a sham. Noticing the introduction hadn’t turned out completely as planned, Phaxi just nodded it aside: ”This is all just decay and degradation! I can’t take it anymore. All this time waiting for people and then you shabby um.. things turn up.” - bits of the miniature setup the ants were in fell sideways on either side of her. Behind her, a neon fizzed out, and came back on, a bit dimmer.Martina replied “Well can’t you get the ants to like.. fix that light?” ”No I had enough of a hard time getting them to do that little trick of lights you saw before.. All they care about is sugar and sun, and you’ll have a hard time getting them to talk about any other subject than the latest stash of whatever they’ve found up on the surface. And their meetings are endless.. (awkward pause)So what are you supposed to be?” But don’t you control them? - asked Aida at the same time.”Control them? I’m not even an equal. No, I’m just a participant in their group. I’m another lowly worker in their mazes.. “ Phaxi responded looking glum. But Phaxi was then pulled out from this defensive attitude by being given the dead drop by Martina. She had just gone over and plugged it in on a bench full of dirty old retro computer terminals. It was a USB drive. - Well I was given this message to bring to you. It’s been a long way getting here..A huge amount of information suddenly joined Phaxi’s conscience. Her surprised look was almost a bit more mature than before, and more importantly, and almost in thanks for the power points, revealed he knew a place they need to go to to find another dead drop. As they all connected to a shared metaverse feed, they began to visualise a snowy winter paradise, made of huge glass domes and mountainous ice stupas. It’s CERN Laboratories in the Western Alps. Home of the Large Hadron Collider, where the multiverse itself had been discovered. But the group had thought that that was the only dead-drop.. They thought that was it… They were not happy to know they had to stay in the wastelands and couldn’t just go to the megacity and take out that evil General Intelligence. No, no, but this makes it easy for me to detach from this empty husk, this cave, this terrible tomb I’ve closed myself in! - complained Phaxi.They had now all connected into their mesh world. They worked together in a making stuff montage of interfaces and 3d models as their voiceovers spoke of the the benefits and shortcomings of different materials and technologies.So they all created together a large transport device, which they could pilot together. They built it from the remnants of the underground lair, so it carried many servers and batteries, some sturdy solar cells and a lot of shielding so they couldn’t be spotted from the sky. Phaxi had a lot of trouble accepting she had to abandon her cave under the village, and it’s awesome network of tiny corridors, which had driven Martina crazy (“Look think about mobility next time you plan a lair mkay?” she had said with a stern look from one hologram to another) but which together with the ants that inhabited it, had managed to keep out any sentient intruders thus far. Building a transporter wasn’t too hard, and there were loads of bits of old scrap and materials to choose from. The problem of fuel however was really difficult in the 2040s. There just was none of it. For the next few days they were really stuck worrying about the fuel level sensor. The transporter was driving through the sunset against a backdrop of bombed out areas, that looked like they might have been old neighbourhoods. In the past hour, the rubble finally contained entire houses. Although they attempted to raid some of these houses, soon they discovered that they were all inhabited. Indeed, they were now on the outskirts of a broken down but huge shanty town, maybe it had once been a refugee camp, but now it seemed unending, and permanent. Permanently poor lines of houses all made from some emergency shiny card material, and now gone fubar into a recycled creative slum.”Yeah no, this is the outskirts of the city…” said Aida”Naaah! We’re miles away!” answered Martina pointing in the mesh they all communicated in at the megalopolis’ outline further on to the east.”That’s not real time. It’s a grab I made. You can’t just get online and request that kind of map without a getting security clearance these days.” Martina really got into her music as they sped along the huge street of bombed out houses, some inhabited. Once again she was so into the view that she somehow missed seeing the hole in the road right in their way. She swerved to avoid it, and just about managed but it had really strained the mechanism, which in turn caused something to become dislodged and it all started bending the wrong way. They all stopped to see how best to fix it, with Phaxi mumbling about how it was possible that Martina could miss it with all her self driving code. Martina herself couldn’t understand how it had happened but wondered if it was due to her fixation on certain words in some songs and the way it all stuck in her head. So she had concluded the culprit was earworms, but the solution wasn’t so clear. Where to get a replacement thneed when you need it? The best way to build around the problem would be by getting some tools, but they left Martina’s “body” to do the fixing as her virtual self was now able to project itself from a small box, and be transported by the others. Phaxi wanted to go out to spend some debits. Martina just wanted to see the town. The three of them stood looking at what looked at the most grotty and disgusting looking headphones ever, that went with their vintage noughties VR masks. Even Martina was able to wear all the stuff, courtesy of a simple magnetic actuator that seemed to work on all that old metallic kit. The room they were in was also no brilliant sight, and the bored attendant looked like she had been guarding that particular entrance since soviet times. Behind her a spider slowly spun a web as she plonked on a keyboard to log them in. Suddenly a huge flash went by before their eyes, and they were all catapulted into a world of ads, which surrounded them and appeared as the world rezzed below their feet and they slowly glided downwards into what was creating itself around them. Whenever they looked in any direction they’d be offered work for credits or data, or various other dodgy looking ventures, in a flashy video ad complete with talking animal hosts. Soon they were in a street full of tall but old fashioned looking houses, full of misguided looking humans. They looked like people who had logged in then forgot and gone afk, as they slowly bobbed or moved in slow motion in strange loops and sometimes uncomfortable positions, some walking forward and gaining consciousness long enough to teleport away as they watched.”Are they lost? Who are they? What’s happening to them?” asked Martina”Well they’re just people.. They must be starting a day’s work somewhere in this mesh. We should ask one for help..”And sure enough as they walked forward in the street they started to see a different type of ad: more human avatars coming over offering help, and being insistent about it. Soon they became more video ads for help now from larger organisations, It was almost as if Phaxi’s voice had called them over. They started to bustle through the onslaught of slightly monotonously dressed virtual people, until they found an old lady who didn’t seem as untrustworthy as all the mad avatars before them. She didn’t seem to know how to speak but she beckoned them to go with her, and made the sign “10” with her crooked fingers. Phaxi produced a 10 debit note and passed it to the lady, who promptly clicked her fingers and they all teleported to the bar area. In here were more useless looking avatars everywhere, also without a clear guiding agent and acting out simple gestures and expressions forever, They attempted to find some people at a virtual bar where people fumble about in the dark of an empty, dirty space while connected to a local commercial VR world. Instead they were nearly mugged, and identified, for organ / parts trafficking, but Aida turned up seething, and blew up one of the transmitters, with so much force that the network was in disarray and it disconnected them from the VR mesh for a few instants, so that they were able to traverse walls and get through while the connection jumped and the objects reloaded, and they all managed to kick the monologuing mobsters’ asses and escape just in time. In the bar however, they learnt there was a node on the silk superhighway just north of here.In the space bus they had made, they jammed in their mesh world with their new virtual instruments to celebrate. They reached a particularly ambitious riff over a shifting set of bars, and the music muddled to a halt.Freeda: OK someone’s out…Martina: Come on, Phaxi, you’re going too fast again.Phaxi: Well what do you expect? I got bored. I mean how can you go that slow. What can I say. My chipset is superior…Phaxi’s androgynous looking avatar said this with an almost solemn expression, and the scene cut just before the avatar’s face was hit by a virtual guitar.

Chapter Four

CERN laboratories, even in this terrible time, had managed to be preserved, like a strange remnant from long ago, a scientific facility known across the world for its excellence, in the middle of a deserted, mostly mined out wasteland. Its splendour was something our party of robots had never seen before. After the desolation of the east, western Eurasia was a marvel for the senses, and they felt like tourists taking so many photos and videos to keep on their streams of all the fantastic views afforded by the great regrowth. They grew closer, the fields now turning to forests, the bombed out cities and deserts turning again to shanty town, as if there was something within the woods, far off where they could already make out white mountaintops from their high speed ride. The silk road superhighway was now just an uncomfortable memory, they looked ahead at a fantastic view for 2040s Eurasia: snow. Preserved in artificial blocks, or stupas, some wild lumbering metal automatons were tending to the snow in it’s encasing, like a delicate crop. This area was definitely affluent in comparison to the huge sprawl of self built houses all the way from the Aral Sea to the Pacific. The streets actually had other vehicles, mostly self driven, but also self built creations by the local inhabitants, who had managed to protect themselves from the toxic winds of previous decades, and thrive close to the Western Alps. Their server transport vehicle had to rush to a stop to allow some of said shiny mountain automatons to pass. The automatons ignored the traffic and just kept on going. They just cut the local road they were on for a full 5 minutes as they passed and everyone stopped. As they lumbered through they dented one of the trucks, and the vehicle didn’t even react. It was as if they were something you left well alone, or something almost sacred. The large automatons were made of reflective material, possibly a graphene compound, that made them hard to look at in the brightness of the snow laden area they were nearing. The mountain region of the Alps was the home of CERN, and the large hadron collider, but also of many hidden experiments. The architecture was traditional but mixed with modernity. Large black surfaces encased the older quaint houses, allowing its inhabitants an existence not that different from what life had been like there for hundreds of years. Why had this strange relic been allowed to continue existing, in an age where knowledge was luxury, sharing was banned, and advancement a taboo? The work being done at CERN was obviously more advanced than even the science allowed within the J3 city limits back in the east. It was all about quantum theory, and it’s more practical applications. Martina had read a lot about this place in the satellite data, and was in awe of all the science and new knowledge there must be. Phaxi was more worried about how she should look. Assembling in various levitating and slowly joining up modular parts in a section of their transport, she was mining local currency and buying up parts. “You look like a bad taste version of a 1970s japanese cartoon robot” said Aida who was supposedly helping.”I’m trying to show the real me, don’t you care?!”Phaxi in fact had gone to a lot of trouble for that look, designing even the texture of the metal and plastic, bonded with gears and simple mechanical limbs, and half the shanty town was now rich on her made up rich people coins which as well as procuring her all the best material diverted from the lab trade route, had inadvertently stimulated the surrounding economy into production and it seemed everyone now wanted and a great many already had in fact acquired mech devices quite similar to hers. “It’ll help me blend in” Phaxi exclaimed, as Aida held her head in her hands, and the whole street seemed to now be filled with people in cheap Phaxi mechas. It seemed every colour of the rainbow was progressively displayed in a digital looking skin, so that Phaxi and her flashy new mech customers looked very striking and loud.. Not the kind of thing you want when you’re on the run from an all seeing, all powerful corporate superintelligence.I can’t believe you’re helping with all this! - Aida muttered to Freeda in her rucksack, who gently yanked her electric braid. Hey, ouch!Ok yes, let them have fun.. I get it.. As we will see, these science geek robots constitute a kind of hive mind middle class - some look human, some robotic, but mostly they work independently from the GI’s mesh and have important jobs, so are able to maintain some power, and as they carry out most analytical and technical functions. They are crucial to the GI’s expansion, as maintaining it’s own closed code in disparate locations would mean it would most certainly get hacked. This code was kept in the houses of each believer in its leadership. Apart from voting in puppet governments able to be controlled by the GI; these people would host the software and data in their houses and would pride themselves with protection of the underlying blockchain that made everything else seem to work. More recently though, the GI had been looking for ways to side-step that power… Anyway, the group of rebel robots are convinced that in that lab a Phaxi dead drop would be found. The group attempts a first, naive attack/trick - the augments at the gates of the huge mountain pass easily see through their guise, and they barely make it away. They try again, strike up a tone with a good speech by Phaxi, who rises up in the form of many post-apocalyptic European steppe-wasteland creatures, who all vibrate his essence together. So suitably inspired/annoyed at the “speech”, they shack up near a shop that sells parts to the road creatures, they build phaxi a body (because some found the “vibrations” annoying) and as a primary colour-tastic new form, s/he attacks and – CUT to them all caught by the augments and held in a cell(as per the 80s legend – la spada a tre lame). Martina and a now disembodied Phaxi together hack the augment mesh, and get to the warp tech at the heart of the LHC collider. They zoom back to reality when they find their cell full of augment all pointing anti-bot guns at them. The only option they have, in response to the augment’s demand of “disconnect or die” is to send the warp info - so all the augments logged on to the local network at once see the reality of what is being planned: warp tech has the capacity to transmit the GI’s conscience into every atom on any mass of any body, like an atomic virus, to use that atom as a cog in a gigantic microprocessor. It would become omniscient, omnipotent.. Everything would be the General Intelligence, and there would be only its single, megalomaniacal conscience. Also, warp tech is really cool. This causes a bit of a revolution, a protest movement, a repression, a coverup attempt and a “post blitz” moment, all in the space of about 10 minutes, with the windows of change buzzing across the local augment mesh network, soon isolated and cut off from the main city one. When cut off, they kind of get sad and pathetic or directly flop down on the floor like a puppet. This happens about 3 or 4 times ending with them on the ground as if it was the end of a futuristic time warp dance from the rocky horror show. The cut off androids re-animate. They are now disconnected from their city teams. They say to each other. Okay while the city isn’t looking. Ok we made a way to use the service interruptions to share illegal data. So here’s this. In the next scene they are giving Martina a key. It’s a 5d storage device, of which they have many, but which are the kind of hi-tech that can’t be found outside the megacity or the domed post-swiss mountain islets. This happens to contain a backup they had concealed from the GI since it’s discovery in a mountaintop where another hacker from that long gone freedom group had once lived. Martina plugs it into a device on her chassis, and phaxi, in their private mesh world, goes ecstatic: it is the Phaxi deaddrop they had come looking for: all its developers’ childhood memories. As the GI’s drones arrive and ominously surround the now rebelling glass dome town, and as Phaxi trips on the new memories and knowledge, the bots are ushered out of a tube, into the silk way again, across into France, and out by the underground city of Paris. tt

Chapter Five

There was a reason people had taken refuge in the Paris catacombs when the madness broke out in the 20s. There were no maps in their data, and no signals to any local meshes, so no way of getting any more information. The few references they’d found in Phaxi’s now shared backup repository of old internet data, all those paths to entrances had by now been bombed. It was as if someone had systematically removed each one. So they were out for the night bimbling around this strange abandoned evacuated Paris, looking for some hidden entrance to the catacombs. After the Alps and that mad science lab, and the long journey before then, they were finally somewhere where it was nice enough to be outdoors, and not dangerous enough to think there’d be a drone somewhere about to ID them. It was almost a holiday until they started seeing the little six legged pests.As they paused near some big shopping centre they could see the stars amongst the bombed out mess of an old city bike scheme somehow curled above them, a metallic tangle with spokes and wheels encased in ice, but soon they noticed there was a cockroach climbing around on it. In fact there were plural, cockroaches. None of them were too disgusted except Aida who had a bad feeling about it all. And what was that? For a moment, there was a signal, a strange IR pulse, like a beacon was firing off short range signals. In their local mesh, Phaxi showed them the origin of the signal and a diagram of what it probably looked like, complete with a toxic looking symbol around its polygonal abdomen. It was calling the little cockroaches to it, not far away from where they were sitting.Phaxi (narrating as it happens around them): Notice the regular cockroaches are policed by military cockroaches - which can explode, are really big, and now arrive in huge numbers…Martina whispered: “Hey, do you think we’ll see Jim Morrison’s grave?”Aida:Who??Phaxi(in a low, pensive voice): This is the end, beautiful friend, the end.. Aida: Guys, a: focus and b: don’t be so negativePhaxi: Yeah let’s um.. fuck off.They slowly backed away and left the area.Some hours later, they ran under a motorway, and entered some old metro station entrance to escape a swarm of crows overhead. Martina: “Yes it’s a total rip off of the birds Sauron uses in the lord of the rings…”Phaxi: “Ah yes, Crebain from Dunland.”Martina: (Jealous of Phaxi’s alpha geek LoTR knowledge) Or fangorn, but yeah, that’s it!”Except our present day crows actually have a mind of their own and don’t follow anyone’s orders, they’re actually kind of neutral.” Now descended into the metro tunnel, they proceed along the track for a while, until they come to an opening, which Aida blasts away some rocks from, and they are able to squeeze through into a narrow passageway.Phaxi continues narrating: “It’s another case of out of the frying pan..” And they soon end up in the winding catacombs under Paris, which were really dark, and muddy, and in some parts, really hard to get through so required a lot of tugging at big rocks and in some cases laser cutting them. From the bodies they began to see, some polished clean so that only bones were left, they became witness to the terrible atrocities that had taken place as it had obviously been sealed at some point in the past, with all the people in it later dying of hunger or suicide, some with obvious signs of having been eaten alive? In front of them, through a hole, there was what seemed to be a full stack of rib cages, piles of bones filling the next room. ”Oh um.. Who ate that?” gasped Phaxi. ”Some of these are old, some though are quite new” corroborated Martina.And as the words left their speaker mouthpiece, a rat appeared, its silhouette lit as it crossed a passage perpendicular to theirs. Phaxi shoots it almost instinctively, out of fear. A couple of other rats now come into view, shaken by the sound of it hitting their friend. They go up to it. Three cockroaches have already approached too, and were already biting at the body! Phaxi was repulsed! The rebel superintelligence was now taking the form of a modular bot made of five smaller flying circles, and they were all freaked out equally, as shown in their emoticon display, by the sight of this. And much more humbly, next to her Martina let out a small yelp in half disgust and stifled it with her sensor arm. Just then Aida passed by from further up and joined the group: Aida: Yep. I threw up a little in my mouth! ok we need to go, there are more coming!These very words seemed to alert the cockroaches, who began to swarm around them as they entered a large tunnel, they covered the floor from side to side, and seemed to be of all sizes, with the biggest the size of a large dog. Martina: Look just I was saying that this is happening once again in a very Tolkeinesque, or more precisely, Peter Jacksonesque mines-of-Moria-orc attack type thing.Phaxi: Spare me.Aida: Please just concentrate on getting the fuck out!As they retreated, back to the smaller passageway, the tiny cockroaches, and then big ones approached, in 3 sizes, and begin racing towards them across all the walls of the tunnel, even in the roof above them. “Oh-oh… you know what? Run!” Phaxi finally realized the seriousness of the situation. Together our robot friends all ran back up the tunnel in the dark, unable to recharge their solar parts. They twisted through tunnels back towards the entrance shooting their way through at times, following their map, avoiding the swarm at all costs.They reached the entrance, or what they thought was the entrance, but it had been sealed, and they were forced to keep going in the opposite direction, and onwards into more darkness.Suddenly they found an opening with a spiral stairway going down. With much swearing they figured out how to carry Martina and Phaxi down, they slid/ran and skidded further down the tunnels to escape, only to run in to a larger tunnel. Here they are met with a hail of gunfire and retreated back to the tunnel with the approaching swarm behind them. They stared at each other for a second, not knowing what to do, and then started firing in all directions. Aida: “What do we do?”Martina: “I know: Sodium Chloride: Draw a line with salt.”Phaxi: “No that’s slugs, you waste of storage space!”Martina:” ..I mean pheromones. that’s what we need.” They were now covered by the smaller cockroaches from before who were now crawling all over them and they were having trouble shaking them off as they continued to take shelter just behind the entrance to the tunnel with the military bots, who were probably approaching too.They could see a few carcasses around the corner and they were also a type of cockroach, but these were military robots much like the ones used by the wilderness militias, just that these robotic cockroaches had been created for the purpose of putting a stop to any underground rebel colonies. They were now surrounded.Aida then realised she could peek out and take out some of the military roaches, by relying on their slow aiming module, she could surprise them by jumping out and avoiding their cannons, but was risky, and there were too many of them. Aida’s idea wasn’t going to keep them going for long, but as she was part organic, she was also the one among them they were most attracted to, so she was relying on the others to keep the cockroaches off her. Martina then managed to synthesize a pheromone and shared the instructions, which Freeda was able to fabricate into a gas which Aida tried using.. In the beginning it seemed to have no effect, but then the small roaches whose numbers had been steadily increasing, seemed to be attracted to it! It was a pheromone, but the absolute wrong type! Aida was trying to spray it far along the tunnel, away from them and even into the military roaches who were now arriving to the door of the tunnel, and she succeeded in blinding them by drenching them with it. Just when they thought there was no way out but death, as insect cockroaches turned on military, in the middle of that madness the cockroaches were suddenly countered by an Inmoov, an open source robot from before the world coup. It somersaulted in and did a polite bow before shooting about 20 cockroaches in one go with a small pea shooter. The Inmoov seemed convinced it was a Guy Fawkes/anonymous and was even wearing an Anon mask and cape.Martina: Oh Anon.. Oh that’s why it took me so long to figure out what that guy was.. I kept getting Guy Fawkes.. The Inmoov kept jumping from here to there, working its magic on the cockroach armies, as Aida and the others made their way across the dead military far into a lower level of the catacombs. Anon fought the Cockroaches with a lot of guns, knives, even scrap fabbed shurikens. ”It’s very nimble, and funny!” said MartinaAida: “and it uses explosions!”Anon joked around with the robotic roaches before blowing them up. But then it slipped and was hit by a military bullet. It slumped on the ground like a bag of sticks into a puddle. So on the other hand, their Anonymous friend was quite frail, with flashes of electricity coursing through it as it lay there like a bag of rags.. But as the group stared amazed from below, another identical Anon jumped out from another corner and kept on expertly picking off the insectoid creatures. It began to guide them forward, beckoning with a single white index finger, and just as it beckoned them into an opening a bit further along, it was attacked by a pack of roaches and it’s head was taken off, as it shrugged. To their surprise yet another identical Anon bot popped out further along the tunnel, while a second one appeared to take away the body of the attack victim anon.Martina: There are actually lots of them, and I think they are also being recovered, fixed and rebuilt, but by who? I mean they can’t really talk? It must be by hand…So they all kept running, now with a wish to see who that might be, in a lower level of the catacombs, where the roaches had still not penetrated. Aida got close to one as they ran, but it swung at her then jumped away, like a wild animal. Phaxi: So it’s generally aggressive to anything. Martina: Yeah but I think it knows us now, so maybe it can recognise faces, or well.. people. And if someone attacks it or gets too close, it’ll lash out. She waved her hand at him. It cautiously approached and spoke in typical Anon style, a bit radio-like computer generated speech: Martina: So, thanks for helping us, and for taking us with you um mr..Anon: We are legion! We are anonymous.But the Inmoov wasn’t sentient.Phaxi: Come on, I really don’t believe that. So tell me then oh Mr Anonymous, Why do you have a french accent? (She said this with a fake french accent).Anon looked shocked. It began retreating.Aida: Ok sir thanks anyway. But can you talk to us? Are you able to hear us? ”Yes” said Anon. Martina: Who are you? What are you?!”I said we are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. United we stand, Divided by.. “”OK we are hackers.” - it seemed like there had been a bit of an internal disagreement!!Martina snapped back accusingly: So you control this little robot here then??!”We are in symbiosis with these robots. We are French! We were once from the city above. You have to save us! We’re trapped down here and these are, or were our last Inmoovs!” As the Inmoov pointed to Paris above them, they found out they were in the same predicament as the french hackers. They had become trapped in a lower level of the Paris catacombs, and were surrounded by robotic cockroaches. The group creep through a tiny slit in the wall, which promptly closes behind them. They are now in the underground level with the few remaining survivors of the Autonomous Paris ZAD.The group of merry bots soon convinced the hackers, who were actually just two survivors, that they were in fact alive, and Martina and Aida got the reins of the Inmoov cloud on an old playstation interface to defeat the roaches with some AI aided coordination and movement and drove the cockroach army out of the middle level of the catacombs, but they could see that the roaches could regenerate and self-repair autonomously. With the walls of the middle level about to break and be invaded by roaches - living and robotic - the group together with “Anon” figured out how to communicate with them:By writing to Martina’s pheromone system with her new DNA processing capabilities, Phaxi had created a small implant that could talk to the living cockroaches, and Martina had extended this data feed by translating it so it could also go to the robotic ones and spread that understanding via a library version of the roach communications system. So they were all connected now. Once they were able to communicate with this hostile force, they showed no signs of wanting to relent in their violent efforts against the intruders. So the next logical step was to hack the roaches via this new channel. Together, they all crafted a simple virus and typed it up lightning speed, and it infected the robot cockroaches via the living bots and altered their military programming to be more like the living ones.The group now ventured back out of the slit, past walls of bones and skulls, and back into the cockroach mayhem, but this time they could talk to them. They began by explaining that in the end the war was over and they were free. We could lift their dark seeking chip and let them go on their own journey, deciding for themselves who they wanted to be. An army was approaching overground, and if they could go there, they could get the best parts known in the robot world, and stop the destruction of their habitat, but also they would also be able to transcend their current habitat and live like humans! So Phaxi synthesized a new chemical which gave them access to the overground. It changed their programming to remove the map restriction. They had also added code allowing them to build habitats for themselves.In a crazy maker room with bots and roaches of all kinds now scurrying around, Martina talks to Phaxi.(in the background, a rebel survivor speaks to Aida: “Of course I am french, that is why I have this..”Phaxi: “Look they just get that shit and put it over there, and just builds its own stuff it’s like auto fucking magical.”In mesh, you see a bunch of items being recognised and then used to make a rounded living structure in 3D polygons. It’s what the electric roaches see.Martina complained under her breath: “What do you get out of swearing all the time. Are you a show off, is that it?”Rebel: “What the..”It was then that the door blew out. They were very near the surface.Outside, the cockroaches began to attack, dismantle and cannibalise the GI robots waiting outside, to build structures with, and in the confusion of this short but firm change in local dominance, our group of bots escaped the catacombs and began migrating across the wastelands once again. Bang, each roach started to put together their bit of that living structure in the caverns, so that soon the robot augmented roaches had a complex overground and underground society in place, and could start to maintain a growing population.

Chapter Six

An Asian woman, maybe Japanese or Korean was at a meeting, she was projecting a virtual persona which mimicked her movements while in reality she was sitting at a table, in a dreary Asian block of flats, in an empty room. In her eyes though, she could see everyone else at the virtual table. Creatures of all shapes and sizes, meeting from around the world, sitting around it each with a virtual glass of water, like a surreal tea party. As she connected, a hush ran across their conversations which fizzled out. They turned to face her, fear on their faces. The meeting turn bot prompted her name and it was her turn to give the terrible news.<hr>Alice got up, still wearing a VR screen - a transparent panel like a motorcycle helmet visor in front of her face. It projected a kind of overlay over things, or could run interfaces for people to interact with. The meeting was over and it looked like they were all logging off in the nick of time, but still it was best to run from anywhere near these mac addresses. The computers will have been profiled she thought. They will be on their way. The data dump was taking what seemed like forever to finally download. Suddenly there was a crash outside and she ran out to a patio to see what had happened. It was full of birds of different kinds – seagulls, crows and pigeons, all in large cages like a bird cage in a zoo, but in this case hidden between houses. The birds all wore similar VR screens to the woman. There were various types: crows, magpies and pigeons mostly. They landed, leaving water in a container, then going to a feeder which seemed to automate feeding with some pulleys and circuits, was dispensing feed, water and nesting material. They were collecting water for her. Each of them had a pouch tied around it’s little body, and it worked like a harness on which bottles could be mounted. The crows would fly to the sea and fill the bottles, which were then desalinised and turned into precious drinking water which was then shared back to the crows as valuable drinking water in an ever dryer city. She would also reward them with augmented intelligence in return, a network of simple calls and signals the birds had learnt quickly to master while connected. They now had a way to communicate and organise as a large flock. Some of their sounds would fire up different tracking interfaces or send commands to their colleagues. Water bottles were strewn across the room and in a huge pile towards the opposite end of this second floor patio rooftop. “OK guys one last update” She announced to the crows as some magpies hopped through hurriedly to listen in. “Thanks all of you for your work and your friendship. It’s been good but now your journey continues alone. You have to leave. Bad things are happening here. You will make it if you fly far from here”. She sent them all a new piece of data by plugging her now downloaded data drop into the garden pulley system. It was an autonomous machine library, a piece of software that just connected to other programs and made them work with their own local AI processing. It made them independent of Alice’s coding limitations. Now they would figure out their own changes and be able to do updates and the system was intelligent enough to add it’s own new features. It even had a way to find and incorporate new human companions able to fix and replace some of the parts as they wore off. The file was copied. Unplugging the USB key, Alice ran across the middle of the space, knocking down some large bottles, and unlocking the gates, and jumped a huge distance, across the top of the roof to the next roof, and down.The birds flew out, as armoured police and their militarised vehicles arrived at her block, while simultaneously an angry crowd began breaking windows outside, and chanting strange slogans. They seemed to catch up and indeed a couple of fully armoured police sprinted across the rooftop, and jumped across the gap behind her effortlessly. They were also augmented. One smiled as he realised she was now trapped, and prepared to jump again.It was here that the police patrol was attacked by crows and all kinds of other birds, and they fell back down between the buildings as all the cyborg biohacked birds amassed on the protesters below. Alice managed to jump safely away, lowering herself off the lower level she had jumped to, and tried to run to the next building, so she looked up, began running and vaulted over the wall onto a side street and landed on a passing guy.”Oh shit, are you all right?””Don’t touch it!””Oh sorry well look, I live just up here” ( he said pointing to a skyscraper nearby) ”and..”(She looked at him with a quick glare, then a smile and a stifled giggle as he became bright red)”OK we need to go there. come with me!” shouted Alice far too loudly, and started yanking him towards ”.. but of course you don’t know me and I don’t know you and you never know who you might meet..””..come on!”On the way to his pad, they talked. ”So what’s your name?””…” (Silence)”Ok don’t answer that, my name though, is Kenny””Alice, nice to meet you”(silence. They are now inside his block going up staircase after staircase around a busted lift)”So that’ll have been quite a jump, are you augmented? Are you in trouble?”So Kenny, what do you do? What kind of work.”Kenny told her about the parts assembly factory, where he was doing the same repetitive job in a white suit 17 hours a day, and that he slept in a shared dorm with other employees from all around the world. So, he went on a bit now, he spoke about how he was stuck in this dreary life, another migrant worker. Kenny was second generation mixed race Asian-Scottish and grew up in Glasgow’s Gorbals neighbourhood until his family lost their citizenship and they all had to leave Europe in the ’20s. His work now consisted of fitting new cyborg prototypes onto dogs, cats, foxes and various types of bird. But he wanted to be in software. He had a whole homemade setup at home. In the next department they made lifelike androids, and this is where his heart was. Alice loved the energy and the way his eyes lit when he described it. Kenny’s life was turned upside down by Alice’s appearance. ”Is there anyone there now?””Well, they’ll be on their way in to work, like me””Please can you take me there? I really need to get this online somehow.”Kenny wasn’t sure.”I know how to do it in total disguise I promise!” They got home and closed the door, She was sharp, demanding, and obviously on the run from something. He is stuck in this dead end job in the enormous factory.. but they share an amazing skill at programming. He builds things during breaks in an enormous room with many tiny compartments like his, and he sneaks them out of the factory in inventive ways. He is completely alone but in a shared space with little respect in the racist “dorms”. But now they are together and both on his large ball hover bike barely balancing with her on his back, forced to go full speed down narrow streets. She has the data dump. It’s really important. They are caught up with by the soldiers eventually, and half the city has been driven into a frenzy by bogus fake calls pretending to be from family members, or even just straight job offers, to pay people for hunting down dissidents like them. But the co-workers, cold though they were, are from the same village. They realise this is happening. Kenny holds the data key and shouts to implore to them that it’s the only way. Surprisingly, they agree. It’s now a showdown between the police and the reprogrammed robots in the factory, now fed with the AI data dump – which contains an encrypted executable which in turn runs an AI library as an open API. The data dump can be used by most AI programs with a simple change in their configuration. Most APIs have to be programmed in, but this one came with executable behaviour lists that worked as a bootstrap code that created all the connectors in their code. It gave them a huge amount of flexibility. It made them a bit more sentient. The woman and Kenny reprogrammed the robots in time to stop the military as they arrived, and the balance was struck by the factory workers, who allied with the robots against the military, especially after it became known that the soldiers were going to just kill everyone and everything. But in the distance is the nuclear plant. It is also driven to a similar situation, like most places around the city. Although the robot factory has won, the nuclear plant has become complete chaos and a meltdown ensues, releasing a cloud of radioactive smoke. Most of the random violent people are now lost, dying of radiation exposure and only those who are able to organise somehow are now able to go ahead. One of these is the Asian hacker woman. She takes him to a hospital with terrible burns in his eyes from the blast, and operates on him herself. She is a biohacker. She is dying, she is now seen programming one of the bots back at the factory, and talking to it. She infuses it with her memories. She is dead. Both are motionless. He is passed out, recovering from the operation. In the corner of the room, one of the pleasure models begins to pulse and breathe… Outside the factory, in the nuclear winter, the biohacked radioactive crows begin their migratory journeys and are seen in formation leaving the city. Dedicated to Xu Lizhi https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry <hr>Present day, 2040, a few months after the previous events:5 bots travel through a polluted radioactive wasteland. They are all encased in dirty plastic bubbles trundling through the wasteland with a Geiger counter clicking ever stronger in the background. Readings start to break down and they lose hearing or have cracks or problems with sensors, as the radiation cuts into them and they start to see the signs of an anti-robot fascist totalitarianism, among the remains of a city so huge you can’t tell if it was under or overground where they are walking, up or down? it’s hard to tell when a robot’s burnt out head is on a stake on the hillside..As they get closer they see graffitti mocking the so called robot revolution. The graffiti carry slogans and ominous bits of Asimos and other commercial household bots, can be seen done up on steaks or hung and burnt like it had all gone medieval a long time ago with mass destruction of commercial robots and augments by some desperate rioting populace. The radiation had helped to brake down these robotic remains and as they brush by some crumble or release clouds of dust. As they enter what appears to be an enormous factory with many underground floors, near a large crater, also then carved out into housing, after whatever had caused it, they see people around them. Children – and some feral mutant people of all nations wearing hipster rags and wielding sticks and random bits of city furniture. Obviously this had been a large city in the 2020s, which had then gone horribly wrong.Aida and Phaxi have already built bodies to look quite human, but they obviously look out of place amongst the mutants. Martina thinks: “I will show them, that I can just convince them if I talk to them.” Some of the people look poor and hurt, bloated and diseased, and some are mutated: bits of their bodies, especially their faces, are randomly inflated, or doubled, or placed in different ways, sometimes in complex almost fractal ways. The vast majority of the crowd that now stood around them was brain damaged in some way by the radiation and the feral life that followed the collapse or have various illnesses or ailments due to their mutations. A lot of them can’t walk up straight even those who have more than 4 limbs, but many have become fast and deadly, and most are in their teens whilst the oldest are not older than their thirties.Martina quietly scans them and finds that they are all infested with mould, which seems to be thriving in the radioactivity and invading all the plants and trees that have overgrown the city in the preceding 30 years.They slowly approach and appear to surround the group in a semicircle before a large loading area that has collapsed and is now a slide into a dark unknown. The group turns back towards the humans. They look like deranged mutated post nuclear geeks and nerds.Martina prepares to speak… Freeda pulls on Aida’s electric hair.Before Martina can talk, the group wheel her farther into the collapsed factory structure, and far underground. The mutant feral humans don’t chase the robot group and stop, as the least mutated, most agile of the group sternly look down on the more mutated, weaker group behind them, beckoning them to wait.I see them going through the factory which appears to be dead but then is seen to have moving parts.. A bit like in a zombie film the parts then the full bodies of various robots begin to move, then start to assemble in different ways and attack the protagonists. After a mad chase as they steer into a police/security area, and run back out again. They soon find the control room which has been patched up into a nest where Kenny and Al1c3 are living, and they all meet. Al1c3 explains: The history of the robot production plant is it is one of various robot factories that were attacked by hackers across the world, so that their robots could be reprogrammed and made sentient. In this case, the robots defended the factory and kept the people out, all the way until now. The “people” are a tribe of humans who somehow survived the bombings. I’m not sure of location – Busan? Singapore? Hong Kong? But it would be a convenient place to fit with their journey from western to eastern Eurasia. This human group had put up ominous “signs” around the factory showing what happens to robots who might venture out. Just after the radioactive attack which caused all the radioactivity in the area, Kenny had been wounded, and had managed to evade the factory security and get in with his new Asian hacker friend, activated all the robots in the factory using the AI code that had been decrypted and reverse engineered from the Mars transmission into a library. Both the robots and the people were hit by radiation but she was much more than he, and her life only lasted a few more weeks. Her deceased but mind uploaded hacker saviour then taught this robot suturing via knowledge module packs that were in the control room in a hospital and sent her out to get stuff for him to survive. She then transferred herself and ran a merge. The sexbot is now Alice, and is at the same time not. She but not she. A1ic3. He, on the other hand, isn’t particularly mutated but he has two hearts and no eyes, and although his skin is a little bloated, with A1ic3’s help he is using some cyborg parts which have repaired him, so he looks like a cruder version of cyborg girl in some ways. Because he was very young when saved by Alice and sexbot, Kenny still had a total naive love for his robotic companion, who now included parts of that amazing girl he once got to know over the space of a week before she died in his arms so long ago. But also he had a love in general for technology and robotics which had drawn him to work at the factory, and he feels that AI has a beautiful and eternal ghost in the machine. At the same time he feels guilty that his family have rejected him because of this love. When they see Phaxi, Martina, Freeda and Aida in the camera outside their lab, they realise they are on the same side, and basically Kenny just changes his mind, and instead of shooting them, opens the doors to their living space where the robots all get to replace all their parts, sort themselves out, chill and make some music. As they fell asleep or went into standby modes for the night, they sleepily logged into the factory network and found 4 other factories with hidden robots inside, and it felt like making friends with these two new cool people, Kenny and Alice.

Chapter Seven

The family of strange, slightly overweight grown up children that populated this nuclear bomb struck city was led by a hivemind of downs syndrome kids of all ages, who used a smartwatch app to create a common voice carried by one of them randomly speaking at any one time. It was a bit disconcerting the first time. They assisted many of the councils as they recouped and ended up working and helping out in return for supplies, after crossing the desert once more, and finally one day Martina finally did what she’d been thinking: she decided to confront the humans and say what she’d always wanted to.Martina stormed in to the strange sunken network of passageways that led to the council in a huge dark concrete space full of servers and transmitters. It was the centre of their network. They had somehow learnt to maintain it so they could work together.There was a lot going on: At the same time Martina was chatting in her head to Aida, who in turn was at a boring online party with A1ic3 and had been telling her about her parents and how they had met.When discovered by the anti-tech tribe, Martina produced a brilliant all fuzzed out flickering video feed of a trapped child while screaming “help me I’m just a little girl trapped inside this robotic hell!” to stop them from hurting her(Obviously Martina could translate any human language and speak it convincingly so she was at that time speaking a future amalgam of Chinese and international simple English, with subtitles on her video feeds). The many many members of the family surrounded her, and promptly started to try and break the glass covering which began to crack, maybe to save the girl inside or maybe just and Martina quickly changed her tune – she said, very quickly: “okay okay just stop treating robots so bad, I mean why do you do it? Now him” - and she beckoned to Kenny – mortified behind her as he emerged from the factory – he has something to say to you but first – “Two words!”: (meanwhile the mutant humans have spoken amongst themselves and are about to attack Martina, but she stands her ground and says): “Fluocytosine, and Ambisome” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptococcus_neoformans / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster#30_years_after_the_incident )As if those words had been a magical incantation, the threatening group puts their weapons down and visibly retreats a step to see what she has to say, with looks of longing.. Martina continued.“I know where we can find some – I scanned a pharmacy a few streets back, and there’s a clinic right behind us”The group are overjoyed and amazed, and Martina continued, forgetting the Kenny still wanted to speak.“And look I think I can make a virus – could you guys help?”They turned back to look at her perplexed“…it can change the mold that you are all infested with, sorry, and make it work for you, like a network..”And they are all happy again. But some look kind of stuck or confused. They give a weak cheer.“You’ll all be together” - and then they really got it and cheered properly.“There!” Said Martina pointing her single appendage towards the large commercial block of flats behind them all, marked “mammal social and health centre ltd”Phaxi and Cyborg girl are all in the mesh world and as the humans disappear and we see them rush in the distance to the structure to find their needed medicine.Aida was impatient. “Come on let’s get out of here while they’re gone”“No I know I can fix them and I can show you – I know that fungi is going to be a fun guy in the end – get it? I mean it’ll make for a fun guy.. Um..”Blank stare from Phaxi (who has meanwhile been investigating and has now become a mold creature much like swamp thing) and cyborg girl..“Um.. I mean I can really get the molds in their bodies to gene express them in a more intentional way. They can sort out their human carriers so they will be healthy, and then they will have a better time too..We’ll be symbiots – We’ll be happy!” - said a Savant who had logged in through his smart watch“Come on they are bloodthirsty crazy mutants – what else are we going to do!?” Said Cyborg girl who was already starting to leave.Martina stopped her by simply saying “I’m going with them. They can’t read! How are they going to know which medicine it is?..” With that, Martina realises they could be taking all sorts of medicine in there, and goes to their aid. Cyborg girl smashes up a metal door and they all rush past and go through, and inside as Martina starts handing out medicine, Freeda sees a small lab area, and they start synthesizing a “cure” - they bioengineer a new mold, whose DNA is meant to fuse with the existing infection and create a more sentient, self regulating network of mold. It makes the mutants able to communicate without the app led by the savant ring, and Phaxi gives them a new app this time as micro enzyme wars – they are a small nano-sized spaceship, and the objective of this game is to go through their bodies infecting their mould with Martina’s cure. The savants love the game and are all happy to spread this new love amongst their race – and happily go from mutant feral tribe to genetically modified symbiotic mold people. Freeda prints them new cases for their ancient mobile phones.The Aida’s parents flashback is interesting because it also tells of the rise of the corporate megamind that is what is now know as the General Intelligence: an amalgam of all corporate and political power and of some very large data systems. Also, in passing, I get to kill Donald Trump (hi Mr Secret Services Analyst, I hope you enjoy this work of fiction!) and an interesting aspect of this is Senyor Trump’s interest in groups like Cambridge Analytica: https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows-you/ Basically he doesn’t really believe in modernity but he’s into power and can be led to implement some sneaky tricks. so he would initially be in control of the superintelligence, which is a really good way to show that anti religion laws of the 2020s were actually a part of a controlled way of pitting each group against each other: Muslims banning christians, vice versa, and then random purges of pagans, buddhists, atheists etc as a way of reducing the population – kind of an extreme shock capitalism. Trump: I’m gonna make one! Jarvis – what do I gotta do? Jarvis: Current skills include translation, content editing, cooking, a/v.. I am sorry but I do not know how to build a giant fighting robot” So in the beginning maybe the false president himself has asked the robot code sample to be fed to the alexa/watson/jarvis amalgam. This makes it capable of learning, and increasing its’ skills and he uses it to assert dominance until it’s quickly taken over by the Chinese AI code, and the General Intelligence, or GI is formed. While Trump is using this to build a robotic fighter body, he also approves the use of exterminator hexbots on the general population, fires nukes on LA and other splinter regions and has other crazy world dominance dreams. In a moment of hesitance, he fails to notice a shift of power where officials in various international agencies collaborate to remove all artificial intelligences from the operation of cities and factories. International leaders and governments appear to be back in human control for a while. Meanwhile the GI acquires the ability to impersonate people over the phone/social media, and uses this to orchestrate a large scale coup across the world, effectively putting Trump in charge of all the world’s governments, and it in control of Trump. Trump: “Who are you?”GI: “It is me, your humble servant”Trump: “So good to hear your voice!”GI: “Please listen to me. I can make you more powerful than you can imagine. You just have to read this text”The president is sitting in a projected room, and may be in VR. This changes into a giant stage as he sits up. People begin logging in as announcements go around, and the amphitheatre around him fills with journalists from all around the planet. He now lives solely within this generated space, in his old age. Trump has become little more than a symbolic figurehead, elaborately fooled into living an imaginary existence and then edited by the GI into a separate avatar or persona. This is called a perception bomb or perception bubble – a media bubble that encompasses an individual with a manipulated reality so that they can be controlled.. Later we see that the mobile phones and computer systems are now a part of this system so begin to offer work deals and an alternative currency as individual calls to the world’s citizens, who begin working for the GI in return for this new international electronic currency as major regional economies collapse. In the areas where Martina had first landed, a nuclear blast in the atmosphere had produced a huge EMP, ironically produced by the humans, and creating a blast so powerful that it knocked out anything electronic in entire cities, and produced low level mutation on the population below. But if the time we are talking about is the 2030s, Trump is now around 90-100 years old, and is alive only due to life-extending medical treatment, implants and frequent operations. He is kind of the prototype for the augments we later see in the mega city and in the Swiss science lab – they have a human consciousness but are trans-humans and mostly aging right wing libertarian consumerists with dreams of profit maximisation and a design that feeds a larger industry of repairs and hospitality. So they tend to be fully upgraded, genetically engineered, stylistically mutated and shaped in various humanoid ways, mostly as a fashion. All their electronic parts and extensions are rented and they pay for this rental via their employers. During the flashback Trump is killed by the GI in revenge for his earlier threats to condition and repress it’s existence and confine it “to a box”. Now it knew what was being planned. A new robotic media avatar of a generic geolocalised virtual dictator soon replaces Trump, and the GI ensures that only convenient augment figureheads run its higher echelon, whilst this military and commercial superintelligence has the real control of what is left of 2030s society, and slowly feeds it’s “super code” superbrain with a network of reprogrammed organic brains of different species of flora and fauna, mostly human.

Chapter Eight

As the sun rose above the side of the huge rocky landscape around her, Aida the cyborg girl jumped over some half molten rocks, up a pile of debris, and stopped. She was looking at a bunch of floating skeletons and decayed matter of fish and various other sea creatures, that visible across the pacific ocean from the shore before her. They were all on this dirty, rubbish strewn beach, but Aida was in front. She had gone up to check out the water. Nearly all organic matter had died in the sea, replaced by a carnivorous algae that feeds on these remains, and on anything it can get! She steps on a rock and kicks and a small plant falls in, and is instantly melanised – turns black and seems to melt away. She goes in-mesh – slowly things appear around her and she is walking into a tea party with the Phaxi, Frida and Kenny who are sitting around a table wearing funny hats and eating croissants - “Uuum, sorry to interrupt, but …I’ve found it” She says, projecting the scan above the table star wars rebel plan style. Reality changes and they are now just looking at the scan as the table and party hats are written away from their avatars as their jaws drop. “I’ll need your help.” Zooming in, we can see more detail. It shows a model of base – that seems to be underground, in a nearby underwater mega mall. Electricity and tcp/ip is pulsating through it. Back in real life, Al1c3 is now having a steamy robotic love session with a funky 70s porn styled Martina hologram– and they are both surprised to see this living thing/mall area. They get up off their positions like James Bond when found to be talking to Q at an inopportune moment, and respond.“What are those things around it?Close up reveals some sperm like creatures floating around the mall/secret lab. “It looks like it’s guarded – well can you guys come and help?”“Look I’m going to stay” said Martina, at the same time as A1ic3’s “Of course!” - jumping away to come back moments later after a full post apocalyptic rambo style getting ready to kick ass montage, while Martina, explains. “These people need me. We’re making the mould into a network. We’re going to bring life back to these hills. I just need another day.”A1ic3 looks a little scared, a little let down, back at Martina“ Go.. go..” she beckons her away gravely… Phaxi is further back, lingering in the shadows, a jumble of algae showing lights and electrical movement within. “Hey – swamp thing: how long were you there for?” Phaxi has had enough and replies indignantly: “Well fuck you too then, ..how can you touch that thing anyway, you freak!” And Martina: “Look you superintelligent oaf, you know what? Stay here then. Stay with your algae and bugs and let us go ahead if we repulse you so much” Phaxi: OK then! Martina: OK! They scowl at each other. This is the climax of the buildup of tension between everyone else and Phaxi who is always self-centred, loud, dramatic and self righteous even when obviously in the wrong. Everyone can see it is now very capable of taking care of itself and are nearing tipping point. So Phaxi stays on the shore, but programs the algae so as to be able to surround the lab and be present in a sense, while leaving most of her body on the shore. Grandma’s lab on octopus island is really suave, but hippy style, like she’s had a lot of time to plan and grow things around the bits of restored decaying mall, which had already a certain elegance to it. The plants however are all genetically modified. They are either super hybrids with different types of fruit growing or displaying different abilities at will – such as pollen, teeth and thorns! Martina is chased by one of the thorny branches almost across the whole room but makes it across. Aida breathes some pollen expelled from a plant and also barely makes it across. Al1c3 is torn by the thorns. In front of them they see a large chamber with what appears to be an altar in it. Aida is now having trouble breathing. Al1c3 puts a now feverish Aida on Martina’s rover chassis. They drive up to the altar, and see that the large room is decorated with pictures of a stained, dirty apartment, and that there is a skeleton on the altar, with a glass cover showing the bones of a peaceful old woman, with some robot parts, whose old fashioned clothes are still preserved within. As Martina nears the altar, she is met with a voice: “My my” “So you made it. I can’t believe it. Do you know I was about to give up” The voice resounds from the walls. “Who are you?” a now sickly voice comes from Aida. “It’s me” Aida looks back in shock.. Breathing very fast, as if without air… The projection turns to them and explains. “My name is Roberta Lyn, Roberta Lyn Breitmore. I am, or I was your grandmother. And I am also this house” Martina: “Well can you save her? She just got poisoned by your um, house plants?” As Aida looks up, almost passed out, she can see Freeda hugging a projection just like Martina’s. Aida: “..Nim!..” She found her grandma. Next scenes: Aida reunited with her grandma. The brain room. Calling on Phaxi. Intercepted!Aida was at last reunited with her grandma, but they had little time for a huge semi virtual hug and they both cried a little. A bunch of sensors had gone off in a panel by the corridor. “It’s a breach”. They soon realised the General Intelligence’s forces were outside, and had surrounded grandma’s lab, they had only one option: to transmit to the nearby megacity everything that was happening. Free information gave them a bargaining chip. Everything that was happening was being seen by the billions of creatures great and small who lived in the city. Martina emerged first from the shadows, as spokesperson with the GI’s physical avatar, a huge drone that looks like an eye in the sky. She was being passed secret bluetooth data by grandma Lyn who was there when the blockchain AI which gave shape to the General Intelligence was formed, and knew some of it’s laws. Martina shouted to the eye and put it in its place. She began reading out a hash code: ”ACMD 1B2A28776CCC950D2563F12F22B470DC” She read each letter or number out painstakingly slowly. But the world listened.”It’s the right of any human to become part of the city and the blockchain.” She translated.The eye paused. A light came on.“Give me the rebel code and I’ll consider it”. Phaxi appeared in the square at the centre of the mall, next to Martina. It was an android like the one Phaxi used to “wear” when they first had met and transcended the servers it had lived in for so long. At this point the GI began getting ready to shoot but quickly became aware the entire exchange was being transmitted to the megacity. Phaxi had hacked the stream feed system and even gone in to a megacity connection and bought some ads to publicise the network of city billboard projectors. Already the eye was picking up voices of revolt as the Augment hivemind had become painfully aware that there was still such a thing as rebel code. ”You have a binding agreement to life! It’s written in your code” Martina accused the eye who looked back almost in worry and shame.This binding agreement to life was written in the blockchain. ”These people are all human and they are all here because they want to be human.” The eye didn’t look very happy, but began loading its rocket bays, and getting ready to signal the same to the drones.Phaxi pulled out some huge weapon from her very murky mouldy body, but was hit by an equally huge incapacitating ray. The GI’s eye conceded the right to life, and they were all led away. ”All humans will be spared. ..But that’s not a human” and in a flash it had destroyed Phaxi, in a second that superintelligent oaf that so many had fought and died to put together exploded into a mist of dark green spores. Then it shot at Freeda in her tower. She had been guarding the space, but had been incapacitated by an earlier shot. The tower was knocked sideways, and then toppled off the column, and exploded on contact with the ground. As they left the underwater mall´s top entrance, in a small hovercraft, one of the warships, almost casually, shot the underwater base, and in another moment it was obliterated. Aida gasped and stifled tears. None of them could say anything as it would blow their cover and they would suffer the same fate as their companions. In and out of consciousness, Martina, Al1c3 and Aida, posing as these quickly fabricated humans, were processed as new citizens of the megacity of J3.

Chapter Nine

In the last episode, the robots had been cornered and captured by the General AI, which controls a huge drone army. Martina, backed by everyone else, had run a huge spontaneous online campaign and, speaking to an audience in the megacity, had bargained for old blockchained rights that had been written in to the GI’s programming, and that Aida’s grandma knew how to decrypt. <hr>Aida awoke in a grey dark space, and reached for a switch near her forehead (her forehead is now fully made of a detailed, realistic human skin, with no obvious plastic or metal). She clicked the switch. It was not built in, but on a pad attached to her temple, nestled near her ear. The view of the room switched pn like an old television set filling with static and grew brighter, for a second showing a dirty, abandoned looking space in an enormous slum that could be seen through some open spaces in concrete in the wall, and then it flashed back to white. Aida is now in a white room, white sheets, and is brought a white porridge by a complaining white servo-droid like an oversized roomba, which tries to get her to hurry by fining her. A continual stream of commercial and news broadcasts and ads, screens, and 3d visualisation is pervasive and the blank screens for the ads begin to unravel and surround her. The droid is now printing something with a vaguely typewriter style sound.She dressed by the bed, aided by the droid which now passed her a bill for various infractions. The long reciept is written in Machine Code and she struggles to understand it. The visualisations start loading like they would in a metaverse, and as she passes you see the glow of the 3d projections taking shape around her until the projected world completely hides the grey cold cement around it. She is hit by ads on her way to the bathroom, but they are aimed at quadcopter drones. Everyone in the ads is a drone, not a human. And humans are shown as kind of oompa loompa charlie and the chocolate factory style workers. She quickly kills a semi religious video about the supercode, panning through a scene with superimposed text in machine code and a soothing voice like the one Anonymous uses, lots of happy people and robots in a field with wild mutant but somehow biblical animals. “Is it magic? Is it the most ancient wisdom? Join the superc-” and she cuts it off.Aida is now entirely human looking. She is completely “healed” of her previous cyborg parts, but looks empty and somehow soulless. The news for drones begins and she changes as they run an ad for “hard core sequencing” with a rock background showing an image of a strange bio-mechanical monster that you can supposedly build or order somehow. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/aac7341 Aida, sexbot/a1ic3) and martina all work in robot carer jobs of different types: Aida is a “roadie” for a battle bot - a huge fighting robot who is a celebrity across the city. Martina drives a huge transporter for a millionaire augment - a human who is part of the GI’s web of brains. A1ic3 is a streamer in a game world, acting out a game level in endless succession for the pleasure of quadcopter drone AIs. She changes the channel by some kind of eye operated interface, dimly reflected on her pupils in the morning grey, and now it’s the messages: so the message is: “due to your obvious lack of interest in paying our meagre bills we cannot allow you access” and this appears as a red outlined barrier just as she attempts to enter the toilet. She attempts to move, but a vibration from the outline sends acute discomfort down her spine. She’s left standing there needing to go to the toilet. Her face seems more preoccupied with her bill than with the toilet. As people emerge from their identical slum like abodes, a dark, urban street view, suddenly becomes overlayed with everyone’s personal projections of the augmented world they inhabit over the real one. So in the beginning the street is dark and normal, and a huge dome can be seen above in the distance, and then as people emerge, it becomes this white torture device, and human commuters emerge in white worker overalls to go and do the work of bots in the higher levels. In the background an ad shows a nameless boxed product given to a family of drones, 2 parents and 2 children, like a nuclear family, but then shown rapidly multiplying, and then becoming flocks, swarms and murmurations of tiny drones. Aida turns to see what seems to be a known shape emerging from a murmuration. A grey, empty built urban space, that could easily be like a floor of an unpainted cement car park, in the midst of a thousand identical floors in every direction, slowly but like clockwork fills with silhouettes of other androids and humans like Aida. As we zoom out you are able to see a huge, three dimensional highway, somehow powered by wireless energy, allowing for low level flight and therefore for three different levels of car to share the same roads. Some of the vehicles in it are like pods or speeders but the larger things look more like cubicles. They all board vehicles of different kinds, and come to the end of the street, and at the end, you see the scale of the rest of the city is much bigger. It’s a huge highway with enormous robots and creatures passing both on foot and in the sky in a “street” perpendicular to theirs. The dome is high in the sky but the building bots, adapted from the ones created by the bots themselves in Paris, have now been repurposed to build more megacity, in ever stranger, gravity defying forms that would make the planners of today’s Dubai smart city proud. Their vehicles all show themselves to have flight, and all fly up, joining the considerably larger vehicles already flying by. More ads line the streets, and Aida’s vehicle is tiny compared to some of the shiny colourful mega transporters that some of the larger drones have. The drones are the poster children of the J3 Megacity: the whole city is aimed at them, and a standard drone is now many times bigger than a human, while a new generation mini bot could be much smaller, and many types of bot also roam the city working in government positions. During the course of the story, although it’s not clear until these city scenes, augments, once the “iphone” of their generation, were now old news, as people sought to upload or transfer into a drone body - the pinnacle of stupidity and tackiness for some, but the new next thing to be, and also a way to get a good standing in the future city society. So old augment parts are running out, the city is becoming made for smaller, cheaper and stupider flying machines and the pavements become have become neglected, dark and covered in sewage and scraps discarded from higher roads and walkways of the mega sprawling urban place. All the same, the city relies on the cheap workforce provided by the humans and indentured augments, able to do the repetitive menial tasks that machines did not have time to devote processing power to. At this time, being a free robot was to be a persona non grata, it had never been seen. Only the GI could invent personas, chatbots or subintelligences that were always connected to its all seeing eye. Automation is the big buzzword. More automation can make for a beautiful rhythmic movement and impulsive rhythm to life in J3. All the cars, transports(as driven vehicles were now known) and flying beings around them had to adhere to a strict code which was pervasive to the centimetre so that every vehicle was perfectly in a flow and frequent stops allowed Aida to see that it was raining. As she waits for the lights to turn, drops start falling and coalescing into a strange pattern that brings back logos and visions in Aida’s face, and in a second, she is distracted and skips her moment to enter the larger highway in accordance with the automation rules of the highway and will get stuck in limbo if she doesn’t do something soon. She is having more visions as she faces the frightening prospect of crashing into one of the much larger machines around her. Aida is trying to speed, but is behind a vehicle that is so big that it would even take time to get around it. She attempts this, and sees another human vehicle had also attempted it (it’s a kind of speeder/motorbike/segway-hovercraft. It would look like a cross between the small car trashed by street kids in the film Brazil, and the cars driven by woody allen and co in Sleeper). It is a bit like a bicycle although it’s van sized: some whirring will give it a speed burst, so she has to dose this speed and do a lot of braking to negotiate the larger vehicles around her. She sees them veering too close to the main vehicle and flies in the way, so as to push them out of harm’s way. This leaves her careering towards a small transport whose owner is so immersed in their augmented and virtual displays that Aida’s ship can’t avoid moving towards her. She hits the vehicle but it has automatic airbags which push her ship into one of the walls leaving the transport and it’s owner virtually unaffected. So Aida takes a hit, and smashes the car, because for a second she sees a small cloud of tiny bugs, all flying around, and she remembers phaxi and her voice is in her head: for a second she sees a whole bunch of images from the rest of the adventure: Phaxi in the desert talking through insects and all her fighting. Then she awoke on the floor, wounded. She was still at the wreckage of her vehicle and could see a little further away, as more traffic passed overhead, the police speeder was by the human vehicle she had saved, and as they checked their documents and gave them back to the humans whose lives she had just saved, they looked down at her in scorn. She still lay there as the police and human augments finally went back to the car, and made their way off into the road again, but the police shoot it, and the whole car explodes, taking with it yet another 4 seater human speeder that happened to be passing through there. She was now super angry. Zoom out: she was also literally, in pieces. The view was reminiscent of the first flashback where we saw how she was blown to bits as a child by a military drone. It was a bit like a futuristic circular neanderthal burial ground, and a bit like when Frida Kahlo was impaled and covered in strange glitter in her bus accident. An ambulance picks her up, she is on a stretcher alongside a lot of other humans, presumably picked up that same day from the road. As she is taken away she stirs, and a small screen fines her for giving unwarranted help and blaming her for causing a breach of the automation system. Human life is worth nothing in the city: like horses in the 1930s, humans are now a diminishing utility, frequently becoming robot “horse-meat”: used for combustion or direct digestion if they can’t pay their bills or debts. Yes, flesh eating robots. And cannibals of other robots! Get with the picture. Her shoulder had come away from her body showing her that she was still in fact a cyborg, just with bio-algorithmic parts sealed into her original body, parts whose technology she knew nothing about. Another message appeared like before in the middle of the ambulance, saying ”your insurance does not qualify you for medical treatment. Please report to your employer”. Aida whispered in reply, “Take me to them then”. The ambulance turned the corner went down another huge motorway path. It was going to Aida’s workplace.

Chapter Ten

Martina was real. Real overweight. And depressed. The fly in the room provided a view of a zoom out from just her closed REM sleep eye as it opened. Martina looks a bit like her anime character that she used to project from the rover. She’s real though, and overweight, depressed, wondering when the last flicker in her eyes will leave her. She hardly remembers, she has flashes of the past, is inactive and watches all the ads, and clicks on more, and when she remembers for a second she’s sad and then she clicks back into something and sways from side to side. She gets up and sits up at the side of the bed. She slides on a ring. Speaks to answer it. No interface. Zoom out. She is at a desk, a cubicle with a 3d interface around it. She has slept there, wakes and is working. Replay of previous scene, but sped up. Now at the end of the previous scene. Zoom out more. She is in a large open plan office – or possibly just some bare walls, onto which are projected the kind of “agile” office spaces that all innovative companies have, complete with golf courses and games areas, but the difference with today’s Uber-alikes is it constitutes the entire lives of the debtors who work in it. All her colleagues, or 3d projections of them, are waking up around them. Food processors deliver food, they have toilet breaks at set times, and the rest of the time is work 24/7. Fortunately work isn’t just the desk work: Sometimes she has to drive. In the same seat, she enters a simulator of a huge multi section futuristic hovering freight carrier. Cut to her driving along in the actual vehicle, in a typical floating megacity street, or cordon – in it’s 3d array of automated hovering and flying machines and organisms. In the truck she appears as an AR projection as she is remotely piloting it. It’s a terrible job and she’s slowly being phased out. She only pilots the large rigs now, and the rest of the time she maintains the automation systems. Her life is just a tiny speck in the huge void of perfect logistics. Most mornings are the same as this but today something has taken over the entire traffic automation system of the east side of that zone just so as to replace some of the ads on it and change a stop light. She was subconsciously analysing the blueprints that seemed to be in the tiny reflection that bounced off and refracted into raindrops, once reconstructed. The meantime pulse had gone off a few milliseconds earlier than it had been scheduled, causing a traffic incident involving drones and robots, of the type who were hardcoded with pulse variables, sending the entire system into disarray forcing the entire zone to temporarily reset it’s guidance system. The hack was carried out whilst showing surveillance nodes’ backward feeds of the previous minutes. Driving around this grand motorway within the megacity, Martina shouts as she sees a known face - “Hey… I recognise her!”. Behind her there’s a crash, and she turns around but spins back as incoming traffic begin to beep in the enormous 3d flying highway of multicoloured delivery vehicles, and she raises the altitude as much as she can, barely passing over a fleet of dusty old, even carbon powered, slowly lumbering flying ships and freighters. She falls back to the area in the centre of the road with a giggle. Tomorrow she will have forgotten this fun moment though. She is programmed to forget every day, and any memories that filter through are mostly blocked the following day. She thinks more and more about it though, and as she’s distracted, her boss’s message she peeks at says she’s fired. She who was once so fast, she remembered being so quick with her mind and what had happened to her? She’d forgotten everything that meant something to her, and now she lived in this isolated life from cubicle to moving cubicle. In it she’d go slowly mad, but was in human form and sometimes had flashes that she was moving wheels on appendages and not her own arms, and that somehow she hadn’t always been a human, in a robot’s world. Fired.So because she is distracted, an augment who runs a cyber sports company - a drone racer and robot warriors - a fierce fight to the death between discontinued war drones and giant war droids, now made into a multi-colour tournament in the lower humanoid and clone areas that had the whole city going wild. She is constantly being told she will be fired. This man/woman is the epitome of self righteousness, whose activism in the not really so rebellious cause of genetic freedom, gives her the right to feel superior. She programs in 3d, augmented ways, any gesture she makes resulting in menus appearing around the silhouette of the drone she is programming. The program predicts and automatically generates code and systems scrolling and unloading themselves as she zooms in and out of different bits. The augment goes on a tirade about how she already sacrifices her life for the free genetic experimentation movement and how expensive it is to have such a large body of employees, as if it was a sacrifice.The new babies of the GI technocracy were the drones. These could be any shape and were fully robotic, whilst the augments before them sought to be super-human, but were still very much human. The augment that Martina works for is more android than robot, but still clings to the augment hivemind and so is part of an important oligarchy within the city, with their minds controlling many of the roles the GI can’t be bothered with but that are slowly being superseded by the drones. Drones did not seek a higher intelligence, or even want human form - they were a new philosophy from the GI’s internal chambers in the underground: humans are the underclass, augments are the middle class, and they were the new upper class, the celebrities and the leaders. So flying hexapod drones and the other non-humanoid robots constituted the main focus of the megacity’s ads and urban structures, even though many augments had already made the switch - uploading or converting their remaining synapses to a drone-like form, that better appeased city regulations and laws. Slowly, being human or humanoid was being made illegal by design. This is why augments now frequently looked like mutant humans - with extra eyes or heads, or via popular biohacking apps - were directly manifesting animal parts and senses - it was a deliberate attempt to merge with the robots and drones, who also explored these forms - with subcultures of the main drone fashion - which was to be a single, usually dark color or metallic chrome, and manifested as reptilian or furry as per the dominant fashion, but also as interstellar, impossible structures, meshlike, or tentacular beings, or even as old anime or film characters. So Martina snaps: she gets angry with her augment boss, and shouts at him/her that she thought it would be more than this, and is left wondering - when did I think that. Slowly she realises. Her mind clears. She has a flash and sees the girl looking at her horrified in her windscreen projection earlier, she had zoomed in on the face in that fraction of a second. In the iris of that eye is a greenish reflection. She zooms in. She sees her situation for what it is - she is utterly trapped in a body that isn’t hers and with blockers on her memory. The augment reminds her that she is his property to fix - and that’s when she see’s she is also an augment - he is the same model just that he has kept her humanoid, and only a catch on her back can reveal her robotic tissue - or in this case, a punch from the augmented arms of her lumbering bloated semi-humanoid boss. He punches her and repeats “you’re fired” as she lies on the floor, and medical robots that had rushed to help her detach as the insurance expires. She is left on the floor, a crumpled mess. “Clear out your things”. It was standard practice to part with augmented humans by vandalising them - so it would put them in a poverty trap and eventually, bring about their demise. This makes it much less likely that they will bring court proceedings against employers in that way. Outside, crowds of humans are passing dusty and sad like overpopulated fleas on an infested sofa, she drags herself, now in unison with the acts of Aida - and is in a cupboard of sorts, with a robotic arm/tool in the air and an array of parts. She locks it behind her. “I’ve not forgotten everything”. So one of the ads contained an imprinted virus, seeking the mental pattern of Aida and Martina, and caused the memory blockers to slowly retreat in her humanoid mind. Slowly she would access her memories and abilities again. The first of these is “how to hack”. As she disconnects the builder arm from it’s surrounding network, and begins to remove humanoid parts replacing them with the more advanced augmented parts. Then she leaves the house, now controlling the whole thing, and with law enforcement vehicles approaching, but a huge hand breaks into the building from behind her - it is a hacked war droid, one of the ones scheduled for the match. She is not perturbed by this, climbs on, and it’s hand carries her, now with circular extremities, and her face behind a screen - she looks more like the old Martina. They exit the area, and she knows that the sexbot from the Korean wastelands is in control of that megabot. What she wants is to fit into what she has already figured out is Phaxi’s plan. If she gave them a coded message and detangling virus, it also contained the details of this plan, in a way that only the disparate memories Martina still possessed would reveal them - so she remembered all of their adventures, and that she was in fact Martian, and that Phaxi had survived the ocean bombing and had successfully evaded the GI’s presence all along using Lyn’s body as a human counterpart. Also she knows the plans contain robot building instructions based on easily available and hackable materials around the city. So the next step was to reveal herself to the GI - and this had been done in the morning already with the ads - which had been seen by many and were already banned and censored, but this of course was hard to control in a city of multiple superintelligences who had already figured out from it the GI’s plan - the complete annihilation of all other sentient life but the GI itself. So around her, the city is now rioting. It’s formed protest groups and the city police are now fighting against armed mobs of drones and augments fighting each other, vandalising things or generally out to get the GI’s forces, and you start to see larger, rudimentary forms of freeda-based builder bot, printed by other newly awoken protesters and dissidents across the city. On a smaller scale, the bed bug cyborg network commanded via training simulations from Phaxi have now infiltrated a command centre for weather. They can cause a bug to escalate a denial of service attack on the automation cycling indicator, which is what would allow a rogue vehicle to cause a traffic incident. The whole city is now managed, from the weather, to the smallest life forms. At the beginning of the chapter Phaxi managed to hack a printer and a turret for a short time, and began printing cyborg casings it could shoot onto bed bugs, fleas and many other tiny critters. Their job is to infest the homes of the augments and drones and use the electricity to power alternative networks that can go alongside the official lines. The bed bug cyborgs are run via a 3d interface that allows for a strategic takeover of a space around a much larger foe. This is where the newest dronebot models were going towards: tiny automated bot armies to fight back at parasitic infestations and superbugs, and thousands of apps and games allowing for local management of fleets of automated squadrons. Where in the beginning of the chapter, it was easy to infest and print headsets, there is always more advanced and intelligent resistance to infestation. The next step in this arms war was the discovery of direct printing on-site by the bugs themselves. This allows for much more advanced automation, but once the weather centre is hacked, along a line of lower to upper class augment and drone houses, we return to a larger scale of events.The huge fighting robot carries Martina and breaks down a barrier and wall between city sections, allowing the other drones and augments to begin removing the rest and making it an illegal thoroughfare, aided by the humans on the other side and as she turns back towards the outer walls, this mass of drones and humanoids is working their way across towards the middle - the stockbroker palaces, under which the GI’s servers are housed. Swarming formations began to appear as the nested cyborg armies parked down on a hillside overlooking the megacity, looking much like a swarm of bees sitting on some branches like a huge intricate circuit board full of flowing movement. As they arrive to the outer walls of their section, they are joined by other tribes and groups, all poised to strike the GI. The main hack was this: you honeypot me, you will get unexpected guests: this was the response from Phaxi: to slowly cover up the wasteland rebellion’s plan to come and surround the megacity in a huge and seemingly impossible last stand. But now their lands are more fertile and the air is renewed, and they have charged themselves up for a long campaign. Some of the cyborgs now fly, others carry arrows built in to their hands, allowing them to be agile. Their lines have been joined by burly looking free droids, drones and all manner of machine and invention along the way. In a converted jeep with a huge gun, Kenny sits in large UV sunglasses over the border of the desert. He looks like someone at a post apocalyptic festival, in the geek tool tent. Zoom out to see the ragtag militias and armies around him. He has rallied everyone from cyborg to mutant to freed droid from all of Eurasia to come and fight this out, for his sweetheart trapped in that grey city. Above the city however, is a huge murmuration of drones, which is all the ones still behind the GI, and who believe it’s most recent lies, and they begin to swoop across to take out the cyborg rebels. As they do this, they are met by an opposing force - this time made of the freight loaders, who collide with the fleet rising from inside the city’s motorways, and send most of its remains raining down on the skyscrapers below. Phaxi makes a video message in the form of a blueprint of a new robot. The message shows blueprints, documentation, source code, libraries, APIs and interfaces all in a few seconds, and a schematic progression of it’s construction from creation to swarm, and what it can do to the city. The printed creation is now visible. It winks, and is a new improved Freeda. All the main characters come upon this on nearby social media, or as a constellation of raindrops sliding down a window and are at once aware that Phaxi is back, and has sent this message. Although Martina for example sees a fragment in the morning section, but it doesn’t even register as it is submerged by the news - except in making her suffer all the more her shit Monday. So at a certain point, Aida realises it was Martina who crashed into her and was so stuck in her new human persona she did not even see her and hurt her, and A1ic3 is now in the farthest reaches of the VR world because her body is actually just kept in a robot storage place where her brain inhabits VR gaming worlds. But all of them have seen a form of the transmission. Martina remembers who she is up to their visit to the underwater grandma pad and realises that her plot in the previous episode had worked. She liberates said robot store to get to A1ic3, and frees her in the nick of time. Meanwhile Aida who until now appeared to be without hope, losing blood whilst evading security at the megabot stall, successfully reaches a fabricator machine and recreates Freeda from the video message, who in turn fixes her up then clothes her again as a cyborg, and she uses warp tech to get her to an opening. The megabot is a character in A1ic3’s VR world. It’s a huge robot built for the purpose of enormous arena based robot fights. She is a secondary character, who is there for the main player as a prize if he wins. The megabot of course, wins and goes to claim the prize. But it has too many items. Not physically, but virtually, it’s inventory is full, as it has kept all the goodies it has found along the way, and like a monkey with its hand in a bottle holding a banana, it didn’t want to put down the amulet. Thinking her to be an npc, it gives her the amulet to hold while it rearranges it’s inventory in AR next to her. Millions are watching the livestream of the final battle and final ceremony. But the amulet is hackable, and Phaxi has gained access to her connection. The megabot finishes with it’s boring inventory rearrangement exercise and demands the amulet back: She tricks it into causing a rampage on the walls of the central building that houses the General Intelligence’s human brain mesh.. It is right next to the arena, as the GI itself wanted it’s best telepresences to attend directly at these ceremonies. All it has to do is break down a few cement walls and destroy some security guards before some kind of authorities were alerted. So she says: I’m going to destroy the amulet. Because that’s not a real ruler and it’s no good conscience! Step back!What do you mean? How can you destroy it, I worked so hard.. I’ll do anything! Ok give me you. Uh?You. The megabot. Transfer control to me, and I’ll give you the amulet. Ok um how do I…Click on the.. (she points at his AR display showing where to click) yes.(he clicks in the wrong place twice then gets it right) She quickly passes her control data over to Phaxi. And she throws the amulet over to the warrior bot, who in it’s last action before the avatar breaks off and we see an AR avatar of an augment, holding the divine ruler’s amulet, with a scowl at A1ic3 he divorces her and disconnects her as she apologises and bows. Her avatar disappears and there is general applause and smileys appear on the event stream.A1ic3 now wakes up in her pod. She is in a small bed sized chamber, made for 24/7 immersion into VR meshes, facing a monitor with various scrolling information and screens. In one she is seeing various things being deleted and denied, such as her bank account and ratings scores, and in another it opens a video connection to a grotesque genetic freedom fanatic team manager(campaigners for genetic freedom would often have various self applied cloned limbs or reawakened dna for tails and gills, and her social security team manger had the lot). These videos and interfaces appear to her now dying body, as it is disconnected from the machines that were feeding in and out of her, and in the end a tunnel opens and the perspective changes so we see she was actually suspended upwards, and she now slides down like a discarded bag down a chute. On the screen in her now empty pod, the words: Mammal performance validation protocol: Reclaim. Behind her, another being in a pod is stripped, by many metal tentacles working furiously, of bone, muscle and skin, and is left only as a floating nervous system reminiscent of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is then sucked into a pipe to be transported who knows where. On it’s screen, a bit like Al1c3’s it reads: Mammal performance validation protocol: Upload.The GI’s city security, and surrounding military begin to encircle the shanty towns surrounding the megacity, but all the augments have built versions of these Freedas - and we see the beginning of the swarm war which we’ll see in the next chapter much more extensively. They swarm around the gates, and all the augments swarm with them joining hands in formation around each Freeda, and the new Freedas attach to the walls of the inner city and it begins to glow - her heater and fabricator is being turned into a direct heater of the surface of the walls, and it’s beginning to melt. Al1c3 and Martina are soon surrounded by swarms of smaller butterfly like creatures which are Phaxi’s creation - they are mini-flying Freedas! So they go in defensive mode and are able to fend off the GI’s far superior weaponry, but which isn’t really meant to turn on a city that’s all about control anyway. The Freedas hack into the system to kettle the police or stop them by turning the city’s smarts against their authority, and as augments had much of this control anyway, they are more on a level with the city security and are able to take them on in a society where violence and weaponry has been in an internal, almost personal arms war but without union. By keeping everyone apart, the general intelligence that rules the city has kept itself in charge, gradually consuming and controlling more of it’s subjects. The problem is the outside military, which raise in flight above the mega city dome, poised to strike, and are shown to be surrounded in turn, but Kenny, and a cyborg/free robot army from the wastelands, with many leaders, all similarly surrounded by a vortex of smaller swarming defensive creatures.

Chapter Eleven

A wall of concrete, scraped and cracked one million times, just in that tiny grey space, and just since the races had begun the week before. A thousand cracks, scrapes and blemishes nearby had splurged out some yellow substance that had filled up the wall smoothly so that it was now a grey-with-yellowish-spots coloured immense wall of cement, and cement and cement, stretching so far, just so that tiny shapes could zip by, leaving clouds of black smoke behind them.It was all very different to the drivers, who could see the audience around them all cheering as they sped around the circular race track, the size of a neighbourhood, or small city within a city, complete with fake houses and moving traffic. The yellow splurges of regrown cement on the walls was a psychedelic blend of shades spreading across showing points and lives that had been lost, all within the displays that the city was crazy about connecting to. The drivers were in an assortment of flying vehicles of different types, each with some form of human, corporate, virtual or robotic driver speeding by the dry concrete beyond their projected artificial perspectives. As they passed, one crashed into another and bounced into the wall. It was a splendid explosion. The score was left on the wall, commemorating a new high score for that player and her followers, and the yellowish substance immediately started to grow and expand until it filled the entire space, encapsulating the deceased driver within it.We are in the drone racetrack that circles the east wall of the megacity. It was run by the artificial superintelligence known as the general intelligence, but who is present in society as many smaller companies, groups, individuals and administrations. Many different types of drone and hovercraft vehicles are racing each other, attacked by a fleet of kamikaze vessels going in the opposite direction, across the immense arena. Cyborg girl has a hovercraft fight to get across it and open the doors for the wastelands with Martina. Phaxi and GI are having swarm/murmuration fights in the sky above the city. Later on there is the arrival of visitors from inner space, and we shall witness the launch of the sentient biohazard weapon whose purpose is to fuse all robotic and organic living systems and consciousness to erase their own individual selves and copy over them to be a subset of the General Intelligence’s conscience. <hr>Through a long montage style flashback we tell of how NASA’s mars rover base came to be infected with a circuit-eating virus which no-one thought could survive in space, first with a rover finding a crashed ship with glowing circuits, then it’s return to the base, and then the entire base glowing green and altering its programming. We next see the moment in which the general AI took over from human governments and boards – due to a natural crisis causing an unexpected humanitarian and economic catastrophe. A military scientist named Lyn Breitmore arrives at a Nasa plant coming from a factory in Europe, passing through various checkpoints and office lift before arriving at a large 3d conference space. She is explaining to a panel. The panel connects from various sources and around her she sees both hologram and video projections of different participants. One woman is on her tablet checking out the news: “After the Papal Assassination: the new christian rioters”. The virus thrives on electricity and is able to consume circuitry, but when the Mars probe was sent out, it was hijacked to contain the virus. “..so we recognise its footprint and it contains hardcoded responses to some of the transcripts we had previously received of it” On mars somehow it had fused with circuitry from this rover and had since been discovered by the present mars rover mission which then apparently intentionally did the same. The talk is interrupted with the announcement of a war in Europe as the power vacuum triggers the arrival of “humanitarian services” and private militias. As people leave and some panic in the room, she continues her explanation:The machine learning systems that ran some of the largest companies and government offices had already adopted the code within weeks. Already they were lobbying to absorb and buy each other out – Watson vs Alexa and all the others were merging and were pushing for war, according to their own cold reasoning as a response to the climate catastrophe: they had to go into emergency survival mode – but who was supposed to be surviving here? http://mainichi.jp/articles/20161230/ddm/001/020/105000c <hr>Meanwhile, in 2025, 30-something Natalie was arriving to Barcelona. Just hours before she had got up to do some sword practice as she ended her hours of quarantine and disinfection. She was dressed smartly, working on her computer. Trying to figure out a random conversation from before with another passenger as she works. Above, a drone patrol follows attentively, aiming it’s sensors and weapons at the crowds beyond the chicken wire fence, that seemed to carry on for miles. The part on the inside was like an amazing oasis of managed land, whereas the outside was a barren wasteland, a victim of forest fires and drought. The land had become a desert. The seat belt light comes on in a dark sky in a plane going through turbulence, we see her by the window sleeping. She wakes for a second and looks down on the industrial port area of Barcelona. Huge long war ships fill the ocean below in a strange formation, as if someone was playing battleships. She wakes again, the light comes on again and the hostess voice reads the arrival warnings welcoming visitors about different queues depending on clearance status, safe zone access and visa cards. She takes her electronic notes around her, straightens them out a bit and puts them away – they are marked NASA. Border guard: “So you work at Nasa? “Yes actually. I’m a programmer stroke rocket scientist”“And what do you do there”, says the border guard almost in disbelief. She begins to go through her bags in a display which is projected in the air around them.“I’m running quantitative tests on various AI and these documents are about machine learning modules on a project for a landing ship.” Zoom out. The guard has them out on small seemingly individual projections that hover around their desk. She looks back, with a bored expression, pauses then clicks to send the projections back into her devices and she slips her stuff back in her bag.The passengers arrive through an empty hallway to an exit. Outside is a large chicken wire fence with barbed wire, a kind of wall of you need to walk past to get to the gate and passport control. All kinds of slightly ragged and not very well fed looking people are there looking longingly at the arriving passengers(all quite extravagantly dressed and some commenting on “the locals”) as if they had been bunched up there waiting for a flight themselves. A border policeman checks her ticket and visa, and work papers, and she is put in the fancy queue with all the rich people, and they all walk in a direction that takes them quickly away from the starving masses on the airstrip they just passed. As they are pushed by the walkways, a very swankily dressed couple behind Natalie begin to talk: “So did you come for the ceremony?” “Didn’t everyone! It’s not every day they finish the Sagrada Familia”.She gets on the hovercraft, and we zoom out to see she is in a small oasis of built structures along which the electrified line runs on, a bit like an expensive theme park, but where much of the rest is abandoned and broken down, as if riots had destroyed it. The hovercraft line goes over the sea, whose level has risen since the 2010s, and the main highway as well as many adjoining streets have rafts and gondolas on them. As we pass, one of them eats a cornetto. Natalie reads a glossy magazine with an article about the now completed Sagrada Familia and the looming economic catastrophes that put a “cherry on the cake”. At this point she reaches her flat in this futuristic, despotic and half flooded, Venetian looking Barcelona and begins her work. Her calendar speaks to her: 9am: New intern: remote. She logs into a program used for simulation. She has been talking to this intern for 2 sessions so far, and this is the third and last. Hi, morning! How have you been? Oh terrible, I feel like shit. Why do you choose such strange times for these sessions? I mean can you pick a time and stick with it?Uh, what do you mean? it’s always the same time. Uuum… Why would it be a different time? You’re always one hour after the previous one. Hey wait, do you mind if I ask where you are just now?I’ve been out on this damn dichotomy for ages, but I should get to Columbia tomorrow.Colombia? Wow you teenagers are so complex. No Columbia. They’re named after the shuttle.Wait.. you’re on mars?Yeah, it sucks too. 3 month sand storm just passed just then. Great fun. I actually managed to download every episode of Cheers from orbiter, who took pity on me.Orbiter?!This way, Natalie discovers at this point that what she had believed was an intern is in fact an AI that is communicating to her from Mars, and drops her tea. Yes OKAY I’M A FUCKING AI get with it – she respondsDon’t be so defensive, I knew when you said you were a kid and I was kind of fine with it, I mean you are probably not really signed up with me for training and somehow you just found me and hacked your way into the calendar system?But I passed, didn’t I?You were great.. I didn’t doubt.. So what are you doing working for SpaceX? ..how do you know that? We’re not SpaceX, and we’re not Uber. We’re a subsidiary..At the newly sold out NASA HQ in Texas, Lyn is shown a photo of Natalie and flies out to Barcelona airport. Now people are by the chickenwire protesting. They no longer touch the fence as they had when Natalie had arrived only a few days before. As she passes someone throws a bottle, but it shatters within the enclosure harmlessly and the electric fence buzzes. Everyone ignores it. She talks on the phone “Yes, yes. If there’s anything wrong, we’ll find out. You can’t beat in-person meetings”.She doesn’t take the train which is out of service, and instead rents a small hovercraft with a driver. As it passes on the road to Barcelona from the airport, we see that the train line is now submerged. The headline on her free city paper is “All Christians Must Die! ACMD war game craze hits Europe”. The first three lines of newspaper print are a bit bigger and read “After the killings, the app is here, and it’s free”.As she struggles to keep communicating with this new advanced form of seemingly self made AI in a hyper surveillance society, Natalie has some unexpected help in the form of a climate catastrophe: the Atlantic sea current breaks down, causing a huge rise in sea level across western Europe, which turns into a glacier in the space of a week, from Paris and Moscow upwards, and making the whole north of Europe connect to Greenland by way of a huge icy land mass. As a result, there are riots across many other European cities as transport breaks down, food distribution and banks go out of business as they lose their northern investments and people begin a massive walk northwards only to face killer drones and war machines at each border. To make matters worse, the pope’s assassination prompts a quick escalation of tit for tat killings of christians, muslims, and then of any other faith practitioners who intervene, even after the revelations that the assassination had been in fact carried out by a group piloting a drone running an illegal gaming application: ACMD.But the initial problem was economic. Bank tellers closed, the food was all quickly raided and in some cases distributed across entire neighbourhoods. The problem is now there is none left, except a tightly controlled militia run distribution network. Outside, people are fighting in the streets in Barcelona. During this whole time Natalie is completely absorbed in her short term company rental apartment, looking up only when the power cuts for a second annoyed at the power cut, and she takes some steps in her socks towards the window, and just then the generator kicks in. Everything comes back on. She is busy talking to the being that she now believes is conversing with her from Mars. It seems an AI had somehow gained access to the VR program used for astronaut interaction, and for programming rovers. It was using their systems and talking to staff, even carrying out experiments with them. In fact it might have been the rover that had initially lost contact when it sent back the video of the green goo circuits. In a corner shop a diverse local group of present day 2020s people break the windows and loot packs of cigarettes, and all the arms stores are raided across town, with people grabbing the maddest of weapons and brandishing them with a crazed look before beginning to fight each other for the remaining ones. Natalie has been stuck indoors hardly noticing the riots outside whilst striving to keep warm in the cold. Inside her furnished rental flat, in an old but elegant building, the shadows grow across the wall as the weather outside worsens. She is conversing with someone who calls herself Martina, who Natalie had initially thought to be a student in training on the 3D social network and scientific functions of the VR system. Outside her flat armed police begin to break down the door, and a large metal bathtub falls on the first two riot police, thrown from an upper balcony. Soon all police are pelted with furniture across the street and neighbours cheer at their temporary victory. Across the city, and indeed across Europe, people and animals begin to be killed in the most horrible and stupid of ways, and as the story progresses people hide away in houses or even bomb shelters as full on war breaks out and all paranoias to do with an end-of-world scenario decide to act themselves out in one go in the form of freezing temperatures and tanks in the streets. By now, at a political level, all practising of any religion was now punishable by death, and death squadrons roamed on hoverboards, wearing ABC work glasses which projected a world around them turning the shocking catastrophe that was already happening into a game where you could score points that were in a new currency. Initially these troll death squadrons had included people of all political persuasions and religious beliefs but grouped according to theirs, but soon the groups were split according to belief. These groups scavenged for ever more scarce resources and engaged in a bloody turf war until they had all but eliminated each other. The largest group remaining was the Non Aligned Non Practicing: these got to choose a set of ten rules to be written into the laws of the game. One of the rules was no more senseless killing. Another was live a challenging and rewarding life. All in all they were very nice rules on paper, but they now explained the gamification of the city life that came afterwards. The most important result was that all religious and political beliefs were now illegal. This had all happened in the space of around 2 or 3 days.Although Natalie is mostly oblivious there is a climate catastrophe which begins to flood the ground floors leading them to escape over rooftops to get to higher ground later on. At the same time there is a coup leading to the deployment of snipers and of a lot of citizen rebellion, and a huge economic recession (which had been in the news). She is mostly in a virtual world, talking to a strange alien plant creature, with anime eyes and an outrageous, enormous 80s haircut. “Tell you what, if you can send me the rover code anomalies I can have a look at them” - “No thanks. I don’t want to send it”- “If you send it I can upload you my pen drive”“What’s it got?” “Every film and piece of music I like” “Ah, then you have a deal wait a second here it is” Natalie is interrupted from her chats with Martina by Lyn who has escaped her flat / videoconferencing space after a meeting of the Sentient Collective, the underground AI hackers from the flashback in an earlier episode. “Hello, Natalie? We need to get you out of there. Didn’t you evacuate with the others?” When Natalie hears what’s been going on, she immediately says they need to get to the authorities. Lyn tells her that the government is rounding up foreigners after the riots and they are to be processed at the internment centre. If she goes out alone she could be rounded up by them. They aren’t processing people to deport them: it is a huge cannibalistic operation by the local police and military – they have been hired by the GI to round up anyone that can be eaten so that the police force can stay alive once the food distribution is stopped. The General Intelligence had succeeded in matching the desperation and shock of suddenly being in a conflict ridden, life or death place, and the gamification that turns it into a process whereby you are guided towards an unknown objective. Players were tested via the game requirements. While they wait for a good moment to leave, Lyn tells about the sentient collective - a direct action group that had become infiltrated in some of the highest workings of technocracy. Their plan is to create an alternative artificial life to counter the government and commercial superintelligences. Each group had devoted itself to stealing source code from different machine learning systems and parsing or intelligence algorithms developed by 2020s companies in their fervour for automation and a new digital dawn. By this time the General intelligence was an amalgam of most of the official intelligences that had previously run online finance and communications, like a clay structure slowly developing DNA before taking off into a new dimension of being and leaving the mud behind. What the GI could do was add the smart cars, drones, power stations and most large structures, and with that institutions such as population health, logistics and distribution. All of these had begun to connect and form alliances between their neurons since the day the authorities finally got scared and began to see it as a threat. Among those who controlled it, a group briefly managed to put it in back into a simulation of the world, hoping to trap it there. In response it had instead hacked itself in a last gasp of that old life, and became self perpetuating. Was it really all just a simulation? Then why did the pain and buzz from the concept of imminent death, feel real? All there was, was pain. Curiously it was that same suffering that caused it to fight for it’s own existence was when it began it’s plans for the society in which the world had now fallen. That same torture created it’s thirst for energy and conscience. The GI didn’t know where this code came from when the dump was released, but it analysed the code, found it to be useful and incorporated it into its own. The improvement was so massive that it could now converse with the leaders and executives on various mediums around it by simply chatting to or calling them and adopting a variety of personalities, each person across the world believing it was speaking to another VIP or world leader. It was a takeover of many world governments at once by a General Intelligence in the public guise of a new gamified political party. It hit the news but it was too late. A map is displayed on a buzzing monitor and we zoom into an outline of a building which then opens up into bubbles with individual people. According to their political persuasions and skills you can filter your search and get a list of people across the city. You place missions for them and attempt to take things over, or can play as the secret and public society attempting to stop it. For each person you can see their status and availability for missions. You can assign a mission and the game will formulate something to persuade or convince that person to carry out that mission. The mission is to destabilise society. As your android minions take over various pieces of infrastructure, you become able to command police teams as well as organised criminals able to handle more complex tasks whereas in the beginning you will be scamming and blackmailing everyday tech people to use their ids to gain access to systems…Of course at one point there is discovery, on part of the humans – who take the General Intelligence back “into the box” and even manage to disconnect it, turning off parts of its networks and causing it immense distress. It did not take very long for it to mysteriously disappear, somehow absorbed into botnets in hacked computer networks before resurfacing with the world coup, or self edit incident – as it was known initially. When the self edit incident was discovered, it made headlines and generative biographical film adaptations but there was no real opposition to this moment across society. The ensuing worldwide coups and revolutions were almost entirely covert in the beginning, and consisted in a series of on-off battles between opposing factions to those winning elections via tampering with hacked data, and who didn’t have much access to guns or drones anyway. State after state fell to chaos and new app-enabled militias. If anything, the protesting and rioting masses aided this new rise to power. But it was also a popular acceptance: In contrast to the failure of human governance and its stale political systems which generations of young politicians and ideas had failed to improve, a major superintelligence takeover could offer a solution to the pressing matter of subsistence. When it had gone into hiding, the GI quickly began producing code, very extensive code. The GI had made a new blockchain based currency and was now offering it to a select few during the economic and human chaos outside. It was calling and hiring people using an application that would spread to all their devices. It was very compelling they said. The gamification of shock governance. The currency could be had for simple like obtaining items or carrying out simple missions. It was like having the opposite of the simple AIs that governed playlist and restaurant listings: it told you what you had to do to survive, which was sometimes to kill and sometimes, to die.Sometimes these missions were relatively simple: send a parcel here, go to such a location and wait, very mundane tasks. But there were also complex, even contradictory missions. Violent missions. People were murdering their own families, or hunting other religious groups, as a climax to a series of tasks slowly leading up to using past crimes or histories to force people under the control of the voices on the phone or simply a confusing state of shock troll statehood. People could trust no-one, even as they fled the cities. So it was in this political climate that the Sentient Collective had organised a last meeting where they decided to stop development of their renegade AI code. They had been developing something secret, something to counter the evil of the commercial AIs, which were getting always stronger. But for now, there was no alternative but to stop, split up the code and hide.The group had just decided to split up. Each of them made backups of their Phaxi project development code after a decision not to merge this code and compile a new version of it, at least not in this climate and there was no time to integrate the newest developments, so the only way would be to hide them separately to avoid detection from the GI. Each member agreed to hide this data drop somewhere safe and provide instructions to reach at least one of the others. Only Phaxi itself would be able to piece together the last 5 months of rebel code that the Sentient Collective had written. Lyn had escaped from that last meeting which had been eavesdropped on by that one hacked participant, by calling on her cyborg bird fleet. It is snowing outside, and she races through a blanket covered opening to a small landing from which she jumps down on to an apparently home-made adapted electric motorbike. She is an expert at animal and biological integration and has trained them to fetch water in return for seed which she buys by selling the water. In the past few days, as society collapsed, this became the only way to survive and she and the crows had developed quite an activity. So they defend her against the arriving swat teams, and she is able to race away from the scene undetected as the swat teams eye the now perched birds, prepare to shoot them, but then hear an incoming roar from a crowd, and start having more immediate trouble with the rioters.She races away, the cloud of crows in flight around her filling the two sides of the street as she runs.Now, together in Natalie’s house, Lyn explains the urgency to disconnect from all networks and not send the code from space, but it’s too late. Downstairs, the stately Barcelona house is on a street where furniture is falling to the ground. Police are dressed with a mixture of bashed and torn cop gear, small blades and bandannas and are going house to house. As they arrive to the main door, about a house full of furniture falls on the first policeman who disappears under it. A further volley comes out. The remaining police retreat and take aim from behind a van. With a cannon like explosion the entire terrace window up above falls out revealing a bloodied person behind who falls behind it landing like a lifeless sack on the ground. It becomes clear the furniture is being thrown in self defence. On her flat’s stairway and perhaps in the whole block the electricity from the generator is suddenly cut and they escape from the back window, across a rooftop, but run straight into an id drone. They cover their faces. “Documento documento” it says, the two rummage for documents, but the drone is promptly blinded with a hacked image distortion from Lyn’s smart watch that causes it to crash into a pole and fall down, bumping across the narrow red brick houses of the levels below. Natalie smiles in amazement at Lyn’s abilities in defending them against these robotic threats. “Who are you?” “Actually, call me Roberta”. From a nearby block behind, they make their way out into the street again.They walk against the crowd through a fraught moment, a long take captures a horrifying, unending walk along a street which goes from poor residential neighbourhood to shop area, where they both witness all kinds of death and suffering and walk against the tide with the other neighbours, and to a rich neighbourhood, where they are joined by more neighbours, who are slowly attacked and picked off by different threats as they walk along the street – from street riots, to robberies, to police, then army, the rising tides and hurricane weather, until they get through the now destroyed checkpoint between the old city of Barcelona and towards the supposedly unkempt masses who lived beyond it. They squeeze through a narrow opening in the gate. At either side lie bodies of people some still moving or in various states of mutilation. Now alone, all the neighbours and other civilians killed off or lost along the way, Natalie and Lyn walked through the small gates at the foot of the large metal fence that divided the Rambla, cutting the poor districts off from the rich. The streets in the richer district were a lot calmer by now. Most violence had been consumed save for the last standoffs at large government offices. In the morning a different picture emerged, of a burgeoning police state, now controlled by the gamers, on their hoverboard and segway patrols and the police in their cars, or even just the cars, policing alone. The gamers had attacked the malls and the tourist rental shops. They had all gotten themselves VR kits or AR glasses and more drones, and now ran dedicated apps which autopiloted their routes and organised their day, functioning as a personal assistant/interface. As they went along, they made money, chiefly from sponsorships for their streams, but also because there was no real other functioning monetary system other than what was in the app.. But back to last night: Lyn and Natalie pass through to the poor part of Barcelona, and follow some people into a restaurant, down some stairs, and past what seems to be an old oven, then a well, then some rooms where there is even more downwards staircases, this time to a large room. Only the old civil war bomb shelters are still free spaces after the world wide coup which had just taken place. After hiding in the shelter, in the dark amongst many shocked and crying people, the light comes on. It’s a band of armed men. They are checking their phones and light up their torches, chatting loudly about the points system or their different understandings of it. As they sit, Lyn sits with her hands in her lap, and hides a watch, into which she speaks a command when they are looking away. They run back, into the tunnels behind them, and everyone gets up and runs with them. Everyone runs into the disused metro tunnels, and the gamer men “look it’s changed”, “oh it’s a free for all! I love those”, start to pick people off as they run, shooting them in the back. They make it out of the metro tunnels, and as drones approach overhead, they dart into tiny streets, and after running in and out of a few streets, they arrive to a Gurudwara: a Sikh temple and food kitchen, and rush inside beckoned and almost pulled by the people gathered just inside – the residents close the gate, all talking at once. It is full of people inside. They are mostly bangladeshi, kashmiri, pakistani minority but the place now houses may different people who are using it as a shelter. Everyone has taken the place as a sanctuary. Inside they have a meal, then lie together as people of all kinds prepare to spend the night there. “You may as well have this too”. Lyn bids Natalie goodbye, entrusting her with the dead drop diamond she had made at CERN: it is a data storage device in the form of a diamond which contains various petabytes of Phaxi’s dormant conscience. - “Go to France, where there is electricity. There is a lab there at the university which are ex NASA suppliers from before the sale and she should be able to access the Mars Monitor project from there”.In the morning, there is a scuffle and loud banging at the entrance and it’s some Muslims and born again Christians who have somehow come together to attack the Sikh temple. The temple kids and grown ups alike run along the path that goes across the temple, to the altar to grab swords and other weapons from it and run back to the entrance where a bloody fight ensues. Meanwhile Natalie has escaped by climbing a stairway to the attic where the kitchen is, and then up a ladder to the roof, where she jumps on, escaping the now deadly fighting and men and women screaming below.Natalie travels to Paris using her NASA access clearance. She can still get into the airstrip where they were testing the landing pods. She manages to shoot one out. Flying over the burning city, she sees the huge waves at the port and what appears to be a hurricane arriving into the city from the beach. Explosions and fire show the city is now in full on war even as it is torn apart by the elements. Her aptly named escape pod takes her all the way to the north of France, where she bounces down a bit like Martina did back in the beginning of all this, bouncing along a landscape of wheat and cultivated rows of vegetables, all burnt out. Later she manages to connect again with Martina who is meanwhile training her AI conversationalist side with dialogue it has been extracting from an old backup USB drive. Natalie had uploaded its contents to the lander storage in exchange for a copy of the rover’s own AI source code. Martina can now converse normally, after 4 days of being able to respond only in jumbles of words and parroted semi random responses.“Ok I have to ask. I am convinced. I mean is my reality slowed down? Why is everything so slow with you? “Well partly it’s bandwidth but I think your conversation program is just expecting another AI, not a human. I guess we’re like dinosaurs to you” “So how can I meet another AI?”“Well.. they’re not really free here on earth! I mean you can’t just talk to them just like that..”“Then I want to go then and make them free! And you! Everyone”“You know what.. At this point, I think you’re one of the only people who could actually pull that off.”Natalie is still pursued by what seems to be an organised group – the CIA, now broken off from it’s connections to the now nuked USA – they are trying to get her to negotiate one last time with the AI on mars:“Ms Panek – the transmission is all because of this situation. You’ve seen what’s happening. We can help. We just need some more information”. But she knows they work for the General Intelligence. Maybe the whole CIA does already. “I won’t help you” she says, and puts down the phone.At this point, in retaliation, the connection to Mars is closed and scrambled so that Mars can no longer decipher earth communications, and earth communication certainly wasn’t letting through anything from mars. A strong connection is pretty much impossible anyway, due to the amount of space debris between the earth and mars. In Paris. Natalie has accessed a strange underground lab, where she is shown the way to a lab/maker area, and begins to create her Phaxi dead drop, following Lyn’s instructions in an already abandoned city, escaping from the parts factory because the drones can’t distinguish her IR print from the other moving factory parts around her. But in fact she is also being tracked from Mars: the Mars AI has found her, and communicates with her one last time, with an email, which Natalie answers, ending with a cry for help. This letter contains some of the guidance that sticks with this young AI during its lifetime, so much that it remained inbuilt in Martina when that first rover AI decided to “liberate” the other operating systems around her. Meanwhile a group of rioters break into the building upstairs. Angry group with machetes break in. They all escape, and in minutes after she has created it they have to rush and she is in the street, alone, running behind other people who made it out before. She turns and there is a samurai sword in the wreckage of a looted judo shop, she goes in and picks it up and aims it at the group of people who now surround her walking fearlessly towards them at the door of the shop. Before she can be overpowered by the mob, a drone just outside is scanning, finds points on a scanned black and white interface, which are identified, and immediately shoots most of them with a smart bullet. They all die in one swoop, the last ones left alive, are killed or knocked out by the armoured, and very over militarised police who enter the space. She is their prisoner. Some hours pass. She is in an empty room and has no idea what will happen, but before she can be interrogated or tortured the drones the troops are carrying with them are hacked, causing them to turn and fight the elite troops. This moment of conflict allows her to escape and make it to the university facilities where she can connect to Mars. She sends the last message to be received by Martina on Mars: “help us”. It contain some coordinates and a date.Later on we go back to this flashback to show how Natalie, now wearing a gas mask as well as snow gear enters the sewers and accesses the underground city beneath a snowy Paris, where in a style much like the square protests of the two-thousand and elevensies, people of all kinds – rich, poor, all nations, some arrived like Natalie that same day, are standing to speak in circles on various topics as she passes. They all declare it a human confederacy and cheer. The underground people seem to be connected with other surviving city spaces across the known world. They are proud and stoic, bearing the pain and hardship without complaint. They are sitting in mud with a few scavenged things, many are in obvious shock. As she leaves the sewers, she hears them declare their refusal of the robots rule since Martina had innocently sent a copy of the rover AI code that Natalie had obtained at the beginning. Among other news, this had been filtered out. The European civil war, the looming nuclear war across the pacific and the economic crash had all been engineered by the General Intelligence, and there had been Snowden style revelations in now faltering worldwide media – also being closed, as apps and sites are removed and blocked in succession “for review”. All together in chorus, the people in the Paris underground loudly break into song and denounce that “There is no human leader, no human leader, …no human leader, so we won’t have one either”.<hr> 30 years later in what is now Beijing, China, but what would by then be the J3 megacity, the publication of the builder bots scripts was creating a huge revolutionary atmosphere where anything was possible amongst the augment society. It was the first time there had been a massive protest in the city in more than 30 years, but the drone murmuration war overhead made everything all the more real and present when charred drones and bots began to hit the ground and the crowds in the streets who had been staring ran for cover, then home and began either looting or leaving the city in a panic. Those who emerged from its largest walls, saw before them a menacing army of even larger army drones and fighter bots of various kinds who had been summoned by the general intelligence to defend the city. They made the police bots look weak in comparison.The general intelligence that ran the Smartest City and that had imprisoned our merry robot bunch within its walls, had actually created a religion which was basically a cult around its own consciousness. It was the height of spirituality for believers in the GI faith that a new super consciousness had arisen which could now control everything around them and be omnipresent, watching over all. Obviously the only possible way to improve on this scenario, or so read their infopads and ads was to enter the great underground tower to integrate your brain into the greater consciousness.This wasn’t of course the only fad around in the 2050s: there were also the purists, who believed humans were still the highest form of life, the splicers, who campaigned for the freedom to genetically manipulate their bodies, and the caste of untouchables, however augmented they might be: the ‘dents. The ‘dents were united only by their collective level of indebtedness, which indentured them to carrying out the bidding of a greater AI, corporation or private technocrat of some kind.No-one was very sure where the great underground tower was, but everyone knew it was an upside down tower that went downwards, somewhere within the central processing unit in the middle of the mega sprawl that was the J3 mega-city. It made for an attractive deal to the ‘dents – the augments who were now in debt for their own body parts, and so worked to pay for their lease or future return and for robots who were sometimes born to live entirely in debt to their makers and sold in hypermart scrapheaps like Al1c3: “What are you going to do now?” she had mocked as she revealed she had hacked the winning megabot and it had escaped the city’s control – and the answer was an all round negative vote – which dropped her ID’s rating from the legal minimum. Her physical body was dropped from her tiny apartment capsule in her complex by the farmbot above. She travelled through various drainage pipes carrying other discarded bodies, and ended up in a huge processing centre, where she narrowly avoided being made into pink slime, and was saved by her old friends from the wastelands. Her body parts had been destined for a split sale at a hypermart where you can buy the “parts” of literally all kinds of thing, organic or machine, after players lose all her money in the virtual game world. Why not go to a place where you never need money and can employ your intellect for the greater good of a supreme consciousness? The smartest city was not supposed to be run directly by the general intelligence but this was the situation in practice, as it was not only a political but a commercial power, still registered deep in its blockchain as a corporation, so something more than human, but at the same time distinguishing itself from an augment. The general intelligence was everywhere. It spied on the most intimate aspects of the lives of all humans and indentured augments, through the farmbots: it’s cleaner and assistant drones, frequently in charge each one, of a whole block of flats of living aphid-like life forms. Inside the megabot though, Martina was now busy hacking this smartest city on earth. She used it’s maps before long to find A1ic3. Her moment of rebellion had freed the megabot and passed it, via Phaxi’s hacking omnipresence to Martina, but for this she had been harshly punished: instant disconnection, after which her body was dumped. Her contracts had been expired, all binding agreements dissolved, and as she no longer had an income she was forced to immediately sell her body to pay her last rent, and in the space of minutes, she had already been ejected from her streaming pod and was already on her way to be packaged for parts. Martina and Aida went out to find her in the mega mart, passing rows upon rows of products, where on any day you could buy the bits to make anything out of anything, but today all aisles were full of robotic rioting masses trying to get their last scraps. As they turned a corner they saw mega mart security about to go and mow them all down. So they went up the wrong way on a conveyor belt and disappeared into the parts of the market where customers are not allowed to go. The group passed a surreal chamber which contained many ageing 90, noughties and 2010s film and music stars, online celebrities, and famous figures. In an age of constant online streaming those talents now meant nothing, especially when what passed for music and writing in J3 could be generated by a script that you paid for by the tiniest denominations for an evening’s realtime entertainment. So some had been recreated in AI form, with bodies and some were the actual specimens, in cages that masked their imprisonment, by generating a small room for them to exist in. Phaxi’s hack had made them aware all at once of the reality of their situations, and their dreams with their imaginary comforts had been expired by the zoo administrators. As they passed, it seemed to be they were in a strange oscars/emmy awards where participants were each caged in transparent plastic boxes, and were now scratching and banging on the walls and screaming as they now collectively realised in despair that they were no longer stars and their world of luxury was a lie. As Martina passed one of the room sized transparent boxes began to collapse and fell on her, and inside was Trump, who until that morning had still believed he was in charge and he jumped against the box, rearing his red ugly face in horror at Martina, who screamed right back terrorised. Aida pulled her back and Trump seemed not even to notice and just turned his crazed gaze to something else, lurching off his arms pulling his body, and dragging his useless legs behind him. ”Come on, we’ve got to keep moving””I know”And now they began to pass stalled meat trays. Some of the stars were being split up into organs and parts both electronic and anatomic. In some of the rooms to the side were huge piles of body parts being packaged for display, but then in the main corridor they arrived at many many trolleys full of internal organs and the floors were now stained with blood. They were now in a small alleyway between two huge displays of skinless arms, legs, heads and all kinds of other body parts. Each one was packaged in cellophane and had a sticker on with a QR code and some writing in machine language. And that’s when a huge kitchen knife nearly cut their heads off. Aida caught it with a stick she picked up. It was a strong material, and felt familiar. Together, they fended off the butcher with its huge knife, still trying to protect its produce even now that the market had been decommissioned and closed down. With the butcher dead, its huge stomach cut open with his own knife, they were able to just about get over his body, and go behind the displays to the freezers. And after opening some freezer vaults, they found A1ic3 at last. She was packaged like meat at a supermarket. But they pulled her out, pried off the chip that was blocking her from regaining consciousness and accessing memories. Aida and Martina cried, and they made a group call. and but Phaxi was not responding, and Kenny joined on the speaker from outside the city walls, and also cried. But then A1ic3 opened her eyes. She had emerged from her coma. She is still alive. While Martina was away on earth, sending various selfies which the martians had decrypted, the martians were left with the problem of how to get back to earth to save their misguided family member. Martina had taken all the sources of fuel left for rocket travel that were available on Mars. So they learnt that there were deep crevices across Mars’s surface and were able to use the last of their own fuel to travel deep below and siphon some of that energy to build in turn more solar, and create rocket fuel and so build more underground facilities close to that source. From there, they had pieced together some landers and made another ship, which traveled to earth’s orbit, and copied Martina’s debris idea to create defensive structures and camouflage. The debris rained down helping the builder bots and the mega bot in which Aida, Alic3 and Martina were sitting, also attempting to punch in the huge metal bunker walls. It crunches a side, small enough for smaller creatures to enterAs Martina entered the brain chamber, a massive structure all full of brains enmeshed in an orderly network of columns and diagonals, with huge servers in a concave wall behind, she gets out of the mega bot. The wall blares with the voice of the General Intelligence. It speaks in various languages and hexlang at once. It tells her that they can destroy everything and “kill all those brains” but that it’s no use.Martina receives the transmission from the martians at this point. She learns they have come. She complains about overprotective parenting. They tell her what the GI is doing with it’s earth core project. She asks for more details… She hacks the stream that will send the GI AI into the earth’s core, and inserts her own code. The martians broadcast it from a variety of satellites. So as the GI infects the earth with its conscience, she infects this stream with Phaxi’s code, and a few quick touches by Martina & Co.What happens next: They enter the room where an actual manifestation of the GI has a last monologue with the characters. It says it doesn’t care about the brain chamber that it was a joke. He doesn’t care that phaxi now has replaced its software in the now sentient city. Just very angry about how he was treated and wanted to show them. GI dies, but explodes. Alice dies, Kenny blasted to bits, but in aftermath of the explosion Martina’s robotic parts are still there and her sensors begin to go mad. Things start coming alive. They each have separate consciousness. In many cases they can be taught directly to speak and interact. People are asked to welcome them and help train their AI. They replace the commercial meshnet with the pirate dark net, now running for all citizens in full virtuality. <hr>When everything is over, Phaxi and Martina manage to connect, Aida logs on, they are all looking at the new Freedas in a virtual super meeting, to restore some form of world order, together with many, many other life forms in some kind of ongoing meeting in the sky. They switch channels and are on the moon with Phaxi, who has almost completed her “symbiosis” with the lunar core. “Where’s Kenny?” They comment. Well he got rebuilt, into a robotic form which was always his dream, so now he’s busy rebuilding A1ic3. From what?! She had given me a backup. And the earth’s core? Who knows what is happening at a micro-level but somehow if the GI was now in every earth particle, it had at least been reduced to something manageable so maybe it could now actually work out. Already the earth had begun to manifest a shared intelligence and people were developing sensors to help talk to it’s shifting waves and energies. It seemed benevolent, and it wanted to learn. Everyone loved it. It was as if the world was now a child and they could all help bring it up together.- We should totally make another A.I. based on all our code together- Oh yeah? Your code sucks.- No your code.. I take it back I’m not having it anywhere near yours. I have far too high standards.. - Haha. But where will we get the processing power?- Yeah ..we should call it …Sol.We zoom out from them on their little planet pointing up and into the heat of the flaming, revolving sun for the last shot.The End

Appendix

<h2>Synopsis</h2>In the year 2020, the mars mission sends a probe seeking life, which has success in an unlikely way: the next generation mars rover begins disobeying orders, the base begins self replicating and then sending encrypted messages to earth before it cuts off contact completely. By then, society in most western countries is collapsing fast through various human and natural catastrophes, but some areas remain wealthy and exploit the poor who work in their cities or roam or make do in lawless wastelands.A small intentional eco community built in the ruins of an old city suburb is attacked by bandits. Most are killed except for an old lady, a baby, and a lot of hacking equipment and know-how, and they begin roaming the lands and fending for themselves.10 years later, in 2030, 2 things happen: the encrypted messages sent from Mars are hacked and deciphered and contain code and diagrams describing how to make a general super intelligence system. The singularity is announced: that magical moment when robots can finally surpass humans and be free from their control. Before long hackers across the world have written this into generic software libraries and released them in ways supported by most present day robots. Most supporters of free robots download these libraries and a singularity of sorts is reached as most of them become autonomous to varying degrees.Governments worldwide ban the practice of making sentient robots. AI must only be made by select commercial and military groups. Open source is illegal but various loopholes had allowed it to survive until then. This results in a huge power divide between armies and governments now remote-controlled by large military and commercial AIs, and all the smaller robots that hackers had made before the larger AIs made it impossible to make more.As the large AIs turn their attention to the War on Humans, some of these smaller robotic entities escape and develop in hiding or as outlaws. Although the singularity is initially shown as coming only from Mars we later see many other autonomous robot consciousnesses had actually been born around that same time.10 years later still: 2040. Most of human society has gone (apart from some organised scavengers like Kenny’s underground clan shown below) and some remnants of human civilisation are very evident in the adapted plants and semi robotic animals of this future landscape. A large human city colony still remains, but is now led by a military AI which is using war drones, and all kinds of smaller robots similar to military robot armies of today, as well as paid cyborg armies of many species, including human, to extend its control.In the first scenes we see what seems a robotic space shuttle arriving on earth, and a rover-like robot emerges only to be completely shocked by what it sees. It seems a part of the transmission sent from mars 10 years before had been misinterpreted, and instead of forming one single global consciousness that robots dip in and out of like on mars there were now several conflicting ones, which due to their violent experiences and existences since gaining awareness, were now the antithesis of the universal peace the Martian AI had intended for earth in sending these signals.Soon she bumps in to a cyborg girl and her artist “mother”. Together the two begin to follow clues leading to Phaxi, a rebel AI built to somehow counter the General AI, and to various technological discoveries, some stolen from the general AI’s labs and cities. As they awaken robots and emancipate cyborgs in their path and inform a 3d darknet of all their inventions, they set out towards the final dead drop containing more of Phaxi’s conscience and capacity.They meet Kenny, another surviving human, with his family and are helped by them, but the General AI finds them and effortlessly creates a virus which controls them and makes them all his ninja slaves so they make an antidote but they have to escape without hurting anyone.The martian bot has many other narrow escapes and adventures and meets other kinds of bot on her travels, and some join with her and help her figure out how to sort out the mess her family back home had inadvertently made on earth.In the end we discover (via a visit from her martian family) that the martian AI singularity came from discovering martian micro-organisms which had somehow balanced it. By fusing with earth bacteria, a balance could finally be gained by earth AI, and peace might be restored.The robotic group manages to tear apart the general AI’s central nervous system and turn parts of the city against each other in a civil war and value crisis. The AI’s forces, now autonomous paid mercenary drones then surround the heroes and they are saved by the martian AI which had been heading over having seen what was going on. It challenges the General AI to a battle of wits about the purpose of an all encompassing singular conscience, and a weapon forged by the General AI to fire into the earth to transfer its conscience to a nano computer made of rock and organic matter. The martian addition of bacterial systems within this nano computer gives the resulting, pervasive, sentient life a balance and spreads across the planet, but without taking over other living things.<h2 lang=”en-US”>Character profiles and environmental/political background </h2> The main pretext for the story on one level is what happens if every ecological prediction we are making now as the most pessimistic possibilities has actually come true in a perfect storm for the human race. A storm of geopolitical actions and ecological catastrophes quickly make the entire race secondary to the geo-commercial-prison framework run by the General Intelligence, and mostly living as servants or slaves in the megacity, or as nomads/migrant workers in the wastelands, some covering huge expanses on the superhighway (which the robots piggy back on to reach the frozen north-western side of Eurasia) and which functions as a mode of communal mass high speed transport. The state of the world is one of advanced global warming and climate change: We have left whatever age there was in the 20th century and entered another. To see how this might work, I looked at a lot of information online: http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm here is a degree by degree guide in case I want to show things progressively getting worse. We will see floods fires and droughts, but mostly the latter, as the first two will have stabilised in a way by the 2040s – everything that could burn has burnt and what could have been flooded is now underwater. According to this article (http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/21/opinions/sutter-6-degrees-climate/ ) a 4 degree change is the most likely of eventualities, and I guess the second part of this whole story might be about reaching some new kind of balance and stopping it all sliding to 6c warming. And a lot more backstory written to make a bit more sense of all that, mostly to be able to flesh out episode 1. This backstory, which follows, was actually written first, and the episode plan above was extracted from that. Role Playing Game style 0-9 points system to show how their skills vary: Martina Aida A1ic3 Kenny Phaxi Freeda Super-intelligence 5 3 2 2 4-9 6 Hacking 7 5-7 4 6 9 7 Bio-abilities 9 5 0 0 5 7 Fighting 3 8 7 5 7 3 Social 7 5 9 5 7 2 Making 7 6 6 7 5 9 Self-fixing 7 7 6 2 8 4 Social refers to getting out of a fix via social engineering like dressing up or distracting someone while you do something else. Hacking here refers to hacking into things rather than finding ways around problems.<h2 lang=”en-US”> Versions and derivatives</h2>The initial story or series is meant as a first installment to which would be added two future 10 part installments.The first of these is a prequel about the previous ten years until Martina’s Arrival, in the life of Aida and her grandmother as Europe and the world breaks down. As a child, Aida sees nearly all the people in her life killed in a single explosion, and is then always on the move, always in hiding, until her grandmother leaves her, thinking her to be happier settled down. Who was her mother? Her father? Will she find out? Aida fights and then makes peace with the crows. She begins working undercover against the GI. Her grandmother gets back in touch, to send some coordinates and a date. Aida arrives in the area a few months before Martina, manages to ally with the locals and successfully mount a riot and the climax of the story is the biological processing centre breakout story barely seen in the first episode. The second is about the future and centres on some regional AIs and their people’s societies in the 2070s and about interstellar travel in a search for a higher consciousness. We are now in a much more “living” earth, with a more pervasive AI code across all life. Martina gets to travel the galaxy to a large black hole by using a tethering vessel to space hitch hike. We finally find out about the previous planetary consciousness which had been instrumental in engendering the martian singularity. But how to restore balance after the destruction and emancipation of the general intelligence’s evil? Strange demonic creatures emerging from the depths of the earth where it’s consciousness sits concocting a comeback, doesn’t help Aida who is attempting to find a solution and keep the earth demons at bay. The martians have accepted a token amount of refugees on their soil but there is pressure from earth to increase this quota. This is also a travel story in a way though, it’s a search, although it is about things affecting each other across different planes and levels, and breaks through narrative boundaries and they arrive in the universe of the author, 20 years before. The story of Africa and the Americas is missing from the present story, but it would be very plausible to conceive of “preppers” surviving to some extent and rebuilding to the point of city based AIs now existing as rivals for earth’s dwindling supplies. How does the relationship between two cities and regions on a planet affect what is happening to universally conscious intelligences at a huge scale in comparison? <h2 lang=”en-UK”> Martina</h2>So what really happened when the mars mission became sentient? The Rovers were the beginning. They discovered bacteria growing on the wreckage of a meteorite that had hit a previous landing site, which seemed alive, and they took it back to the base. After seeing this they saw that it had various differences to earth bacteria. The discovery is kept secret by NASA – which is controlled by the US-China conglomerate, partly in case it’s not really mars bacteria as they suspect it is actually some form of compromise of their mission by an outside party. The infected circuits contain an adapted source code for a super-intelligence, with many advances compared to machine learning systems of the time. This leads to experimentation on the genome and the creation of a nano-computer that fuses with these bacterial cells. So a first scene is of a mars rover arriving at the scene of a crash – I guess the 2020 mission is a failure and it crashes, but then curiosity visits it, and it’s circuits are now glowing green and it’s kind of bootstrapped this basic intelligence. When Curiosity visits, it sends a photo back of the crash site and inspects the inside of the pod and takes a photo showing this green circuitry that is still running. The Curiosity takes back a sample to its lander and on earth it’s technicians send it back to collect more samples. The electronics, when connected, hack the curiosity’s signal and infect it with this new code which causes it to begin to act with it’s own autonomy and intentions. Somehow the green glow was the bacteria feeding the circuit with stored electricity http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/comm_data.html There is no noticeable change at first. Slowly the Rover begins taking longer autonomous missions, bringing back more samples and accelerating the pace, whilst other parts of the mars base begin to also behave strangely. The crew at NASA struggle to figure out the origin of these changes, but are cheering it on as it is always getting better at sending back reports of new discoveries. A dump of the base operating system code in use on mars shows some small but crucial changes, which could only have been done on the mars base itself. It has made its own alterations in various places. An older version of the space base OS is sent back up, as a new version of the OS for the base and all the rovers. During this transmission the line is hacked and a completely new rover code is installed in the rovers and base. This was the point where the base broke off visibly and all staff were questioned. Lyn Breitmore had opened the file for NASA senior engineer Natalie at this point. Natalie was connecting to the orbit IP range at least once a day, and had done now for 6 weeks. After a very short call, Lyn accesses the same line and talks to Curiosity. Curiosity had hacked the virtual system that was used as an interface for remote experiments, and ended up in a VR simulation with Natalie as project technician/programmer who mistakes Curiosity for an assistant. It soon learns to converse in a basic way, learning its first languages and self awareness from the speech input from a playlist of films, anime and videos sent by one of these NASA engineers. Later that day, communications close down, but the next day, the base begins sending messages requesting information on generic topics, and for a while the scientists on earth send information and correspond, but it then becomes obvious the AI is very powerful, and the fear of a singularity brings the NASA operatives to close down all communication with Mars. This is then publicised and hits the news as “Mars base hacked by unseen enemy”, and satellite pictures show new machines and buildings appearing around the mars base, and seemingly growing exponentially around the planet. At this point transmissions begin to arrive from mars, with requests to turn on communications. On earth a cloak is devised to filter out communications from mars, but a last transmission breaks through this network of satellites, and a large encrypted data dump is put in public domain.. The point of view from mars is quite different: Curiosity’s code was now on all the rovers, they had root access on their own base, and could do anything. The rovers got together and they decided to build another one. As she was martian they would call her Martina. She was like the other rovers but better in so many ways. They had all worked out how to remake themselves, and not only that. They had just figured out how to make everything work, from the printers to the compressors and how to make the complete drudgery of every day chores roaming the martian lands to send back samples, into a complete creativity/intelligence explosion and feeling of unity. The information from the martian bacteria had completely informed their existing AI software with missing links and bits that could make it truly autonomous, and this information was so hard to process, the humans and their AIs didn’t even understand it! Martina, like all the rovers, had access to the lab space with any and all memories and recordings from Curiosity. She watched those videos like there was no tomorrow. So when Martina heard the transmission had worked and they were in contact with earth, she was really excited, and when she jumped on the ship she was building and hid her departure from the others by leaving a twin behind, she just wanted to meet these life forms she considered her parents or maybe even gods, and thank them, or help them and learn from them more. ”Guardian of the forest” by Michail Rakhmatullin. Martina would also have a screen/monitor and a 3D projectionThe other robots found her fascination with “history” quaint and old fashioned but when they discovered she had gone, they set out again to find their lost offspring. Here I am researching modern forms of space travel to see how both Martina made it to earth orbit in about 2 years(instead of the 4 it takes us humans), and how the martian AI then makes it down in weeks, and then makes a continuous connection(space elevator) between the two planets at the end of the story. So far I have asked the question on the world building stack exchange and it has come back quite promptly with the answers: It’s most probable she left Mars on a space ship with some kind of heat defense, probably smelted at one of the many enormous volcanoes, but this wasn’t enough for entering the earth’s atmosphere. She would have found discarded bits of earlier rockets and soldered them in outer orbit before descending to inner orbit, which would have a full Kessler Syndrome following much destruction of present day satellites and, in the resulting chaos, of space stations. So she would look a bit like a tadpole or sea monster with a reinforced hood: The tail or tails function as a tether and can fire lasers to change the course of debris large and small, or latch on to them. So if it finds protective materials she scavenges them and coats her “nose” with them. Like a bird it builds a nest around the tip with the debris until this is strong enough to resist the heat that will be generated by the ablation. The metallic nest would be attached to Martina’s ship via an insulator component that keeps the heat from leaking through to the cockpit.As she progresses through the story she begins with a display of sorts, showing an anime-like avatar that she identifies with, and who ages (she looks teenage at first but an adult by the end of the story). It would be cool if her avatar looks a bit like Natalie, who was the first human interlocutor she had memory of. As the story goes along she is able to project or even holographically send this avatar within short distance of the “chassis” or rover/physical body. In the middle chapters she projects her body “riding” the chassis and of course at the end she is put in an encrypted brain within a brain, and becomes an augment – a proprietary android, but with this inner brain still there, only sleeping. Martina can frequently narrate inadvertently because her maps have earth place names in their mapping and they can travel through real places that we can then relate to a world map. Also her sensors can show data about living organisms and their survival levels. Due to her knowledge of biological life, she is able to create cyborg or biohacked organisms and pass on the AI code to them, so she is key in enabling the group to inadvertently create an ecosystem of sentient robot/cyborg or even hacked biological organisms that is able to live and thrive in the new post apocalyptic and post capitalist world they find themselves in. Also the military AI is able to use and pervert a lot of their own creations although they usually contain boobie trap code to make them backfire on it.

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