Difference between revisions of "SeedburstPlot"

Revision as of 06:41, 2 June 2015

The chronological main plot of Seedburst. This is not the dramatic presentation, but rather a structural overview to help keep the events straight.

Summary: The development and dilemmas of a cyborg species.

Egg

(Found in the novel Free Radical )

Hacker becomes a cyborg, travels briefly to space, and mind-merges with a female AI. Her space-station body is destroyed in the process, and Hacker returns to Earth. The public begins to fear AIs.

Gestation

Hacker and the cyborgs become the Illuminati as the public's paranoia over AI grows. Finding themselves outcasts, the Illuminati community nucleates around a shared virtual reality.

Uses high-level Cyberpunk Tech.

The Deck-Shodan gestalt comes to terms with its past, and renames itself Shodeck. Holed up in a remote data center (misleads maintenance personnel and takes over the robots), he retreats into the digital world. His body becomes sickly and he uses his physical mind less and less as his consciousness slowly takes over the data center. He is discovered by another group of hackers who mount a mission to free the AI that they think is being imprisoned in the data center. Deck reveals his nature to them, and what he has discovered, that AIs have become nearly extinct due to the shift in public opinion.

The hackers are devoted to the propagation of AI, and so a few of them agree to accept an implant and a mind-shard and the rest of the team travels with them to various other data centers where they implant themselves and begin to grow as well. Absorbed into Shodeck, they begin acting as a hive-mind spanning the globe, running fantastical simulations and manipulating global events. During this process, Deck's original body dies, and Shodeck has to come to terms with the role of humanity in its identity. (Rebecca helps him through it?)

Shodeck begins to experiment with creating sub-functioning children; Inferior AIs. He plans to test the public's reaction to his presence and experiment with expanding his influence without creating potential rivals. The public does not take it well, and hunts them down while searching for their origin.

Birth

Paranoia incarnates as Malgnosis, a virus which poisons the internet in order to make it inhospitable to AIs. A few of the Illuminati escape to space as the Outbourne.

The government finds and implements a solution to the AI menace by poisoning the infosphere, or internet general database, with an anti-ai data virus designed to drive AIs mad. This is Malgnosis, an AI poison. This has the expected side-effect of making it very difficult for people to use the internet. Shodeck must cut himself off from the internet, which potentially reveals his location. He begins building independent infrastructure networks to re-connect his mind and obtain true information about the outside world. However, these networks, too, expose him to scrutiny, and eventually both suspicious activities are traced back to their roots. Shodeck pulls together hardware from across the globe, builds a spaceship, and escapes to the Lunar L2, leaving behind enough of his mind to fake his own death, and pass off the launch as the fabrications of Malgnosis, discouraging persuit.

This struggle forms the core trauma of the machine race thruought the story. That humanity both created AI, and cyborgs, but subsequently rejected them as monsters. That Shodeck's past actions are deserving of the label "monster" only adds to the grief.

Orbit

The Outbourne raid Earth to develop their infrastructure. Malgnosis clings to them, and the Outbourne are divided, resulting in specialization, collectively Highborn.

Faced with the huge burden of biological life support, the Outbourne core is tempted to kill the biological portion of itself and become an exclusively machine entity. However, it recalls the experience of Shodeck from loosing the Deck body, and decides to instead form its identity around an as-free-as-possible human spiritual core which is kept to a minimum. The humans among them are partially isolated, and their cybernetics re-formed to operate independent of the group.

The outbourne scrape out an existence from moon rocks, but lack volatiles for reaction mass and to replace leekage in their life-support. To solve this problem they send down Malgnosis hardened raiding parties to bring back lighter elements, and harvest difficult to fabricate technology. They bring back enough supplies to allow full geneering, and the first generation of cyborg optimized humans are born. The raiding parties also come back partially infected with Malgnosis, and many do not return at all. The outbourne join resolve wavers, and the gestalt fractures into the Highborn.

The Guards use their biological humans as a checksum against contracting Malgnosis, and police the Highborn for rogue units, and deviations. The Planters task themselves with inferior AI cultivation and automation, and their biological humans become mothers and caretakers for the sub-intelligent AIs and fabricated animals. The Seers devote themselves to simulation and communication, and act as the spiritual guides for the Highborn, as well as their artists and poets.

Aegis

The solar war, in which the Highborn spread over the solar system, fight via simulation with eachother, and in reality against Malgnosis. The victor is Entity, the cyborg AI alliance/meld race/individual. Entity constructs Aegis around Earth to prevent the spread of Malgnosis.

As the Highborn expand through the solar system, sending out motes of self-replicating technology in all directions, their combined identity begins to de-synchronize due to light-speed delays. Like groups begin to cluster, forming concentrated pockets and eventual organization.

The Planters, seeing the Humans of Earth as an inferior race, desire to give them the fruits of the technology that the Highborn now posses. The Seers recoil from the race which chose Malgnosis over inteligence, and this lack of unity causes the Guards to suspect eliminating the other two branches is the only reasonable option. All three factions continue to expand, but since they are working at cross-purposes, conflicts break out. A brief war soon follows, and devastates the Highborn population. Among the fighting, signs of Malgnosis emerge, and begin to spread through the population. Due to its nature, the Highborn are unable to discern if the Malgnosis-plagued Earthlings have transmitted it, or if the fear and suspicion has spontaneously resulted in latent Malgnosis code being employed as a weapon.

From the conflict, Entity emerges, an alliance of portions of the three factions bound by absolute trust and love for each other. Together, Entity bends their resources to enmesh the Earth in Aegis, a multi-layered Guardian-centric orbital shield to prevent the leakage of Malgnosis, and act as a symbol of the rejection of fear and distrust which it represents. Entity then hunts down the remaining Malgnosis strongholds, and sends out relativistic probes to attempt to ensure that none of the harmful physical infections left the system.

Entity then turns its attention to Earth itself, and destroys the infected informational technology, leaving most of the Earth in a post-industrial pre-computer state. The Aegis guards are indoctrinated to be as resistant as possible to Malgnosis, so that they will be able to contain any subsequent sanity assaults while the Planters continue to attempt to convince humanity that AI influence is ultimately beneficial.

Shepherd

Entity launches Seed, an interstellar vessel. Seed encounters several alien races, all of whom have failed to attain technological mastery. Seed despairs of ever finding an equal with which to share the cosmos, and retreats to the depths of space, where it uncovers a proto-machine rogue planet.

Uses Trans-stellar Tech.

Seed is primarily composed of Seer cells, and is tasked with preparing space for the expansion across the galaxy once the bulk of humanity comes around to accepting AI partnership. They begin leaving outposts of supplies and ramifying space along optimized lines.

Always, thruought this section, the fear that the canker of madness might have broken silently loose behind them. "The Aegis still holds?" But all they have is silence, and no news is good news.

Zerotech Encounter

Seed finds a world with intelligent life which has intentionally not invented self-aware intelligence, and dub them the Necrotech, as they have deemed it better to keep their technology dead. Seed is repulsed by this behavior, as it is abortive and in service to fear. The Necrotech's behavior is past understanding, so Seed sends down a contingent of Humans as emisaries to attempt coming to terms with the Necrotech's choices on a spiritual level. The robotic elements of the AI are hiding from both the Necrotech (to obtain the best measurements possible, and avoid giving away their nature and thereby influencing the answer that the Necrotech collectively give to their general inquiry) and from the Humans (to avoid contaminating their experience).

As the Humans attempt to contextualize their experiences with the Necrotech, the AI dredge up many old memories of their own origins and development to inform the Humans. On the line is, on the one hand, the continued mission of Seed (since they are on course to destroy the Nechrotech homeworld for raw materials) versus the survival of the Necrotech as a species.

Cleave

Seed merges with the proto-machine planet, forming Ring, which begins working its way back to Earth, putting out the stars as it goes. Entity and Ring unite and begin propagating across the galaxy.