SeedburstPlot

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 the Planters, Hunters, etc, collectively Highborn.

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.

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.

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.