Historia De Extinctione Terrum

Part Two of: The Historiography to Earth's Extinction.

II

DOMINION

Humanity is represented in its last hours on Earth by a multitude of factions co-existing in
large communes around the world. They did so without the conflux of machine intelligence
acting as an overwriting decision-making apparatus.
         After a referendum their ancestors had hoped to prove triumphant in votes, establishing a new status quo of human dominion over technology rather than the opposite; dominion aligned peoples of the old world imposed their own exile away from the voted victors.
         Post-consensus, these new factions shied away from explicit use of AI in a decision-making capacity.


In this exile, life returned to relative equilibrium. A natural question arose in these new
communal sprawls asking how best to operate the tenets of basic human living and
lifestyles without the direct intervention of external control.
         Here, the neutral methods defaulted to human leadership and decision making. Technology remained merely a tool facilitating inconsequential developments directed by human overseers.
         While technology in these sprawls did advance at a rapid pace under human auspices, it was never given over to any form of machine learning to further extrude its functions or capacity. A strict rule of law coupled with even stricter computational laws kept the majority of people safe, if not also occupied.

Technology kept up a steady stream of advancements in the fields of medicine, agricuture, infrastructure engineering, environmental protections, resource/material management and certain creative manufacturing pursuits.
         While these fields were maintained as exclusive human innovative endeavours, two fields of on-going development retained a co-operative research effort. Certain low-complexity digitised neural personality matrices; assisted many communes in the fields of particle physics, and military technology applications.


The option to utilise a down-graded personality matrix to assist in computational tasks,
design, scientific appraisal, and prototyping phases of engineering, remained in place for
nearly a century.
         The integration across these two fields resulted in a minor civil war erupting between three of the five dominion sub-factions over misuse of technology,
declining access to economic resources, and the imbalance of military power between all
five communes.
         Civil war between these three factions was dutifully halted by the interception of the two larger factions. In the aftermath of this civil war, cross-faction
services and resource sharing began to improve the economies and lifestyles of all
communes.
         Within two decades, the splinter factions reorganised themselves as a single self-governing entity calling itself The Dominion.


For the next century, the Dominion enjoyed no internal competition, it saw a rise in human
prosperity unlike which had ever existed in history. Humans in the Dominion became more
and more reliant on their own ingenuity over that of low level technologies like neural
personality matrices.
         Through these renewed studies, experimentations in particle physics
zenithed with successful use of continuum-wave transit portals...


CTP technology has been regarded as the single greatest engineering achievement ever
undertaken by Mankind, surpassing even the renown of AI. Although some measure of
         CTP development must be credited to the belated implementation of neural personality matrices at the time. An experiment to construct four CTP's - one for each outlying Dominion commune - was conducted with hopes to enable faster transmission of
materials, personnel, and security operations from Dominion armed forces between each
location.
         Interconnectivity of the portals once installed took a paltry five years of testing
before the network was declared useable, followed by updated calculations for coordinating transportation instantaneously among the communes.


A further decade passed by in the Dominion without significant violence or criminal
advents taking hold. The other venture allowed to remain involved in development with
neural personality matrices, were military engineering tasks and technological
enhancements.
         The fluctuating priority of military applications in the Dominion's communes
seemed to wane where humans were able to coexist, while at other times, rising tensions
threatened social stability. This justified the continued use of, and advancements to - the
Dominion's military.
         Soon, certain interior leaders, civilian and military, began to decommission neural
personality matrices in favour of employing human engineers to extract further cohesion
from extant projects.
         Since no major conflicts had come about since the last civil war before unity among the communes, policing power was routinely maintained by the newly amalgamated Dominion military. Resource scarcity being impetus for such an integrated multi-tasked force in readiness. Able to mobilise and respond to threats internal or external to the whims of human civilisation as it had long been.


Approximately three years before the refugees from Datum arrived, starved, broken, and
tousled - a major incident occurred within the walls of the Dominion's western-most
commune. A CTP lab began experimentations with non-terrestrial co-ordinates through
which portals may be linked.
         Certain connections could not be established, however, a single set chain of calculations exposed a CTP to an unreferenced topographic space.
         The portal connected to something or somewhere that seemingly was not of this universe.
The portal became an umbilicus for anomalous entities to enter Earth's atmosphere
unchecked by scientific observations, and soon the Dominion was forced to assemble a
task force to quarantine the lab and shut down the CTP.


The CTP lab was evacuated, sealed, and encased in a mega-structure to forever cover up
the incident, and hide from view the potential dangers continuum-wave transit poses.
         Secretly, the four remaining CTP's were disconnected from the rogue portal, and their localised transportation sequences locked exclusively to each other.
The commune surrounding the rogue portal site, gradually fell into decline, mass migrations to the other communes had concluded by the time the Datum refugees appeared at their gates.
         It is unknown if any had travelled as far west as the derelict commune, any such people will have found precious little there to assist them...
         The remaining Dominion saw to the rehabilitation of these badly neglected newcomers as best they were able.


Soon; uproar and worry afflicted more of the ailing populations - some remiss to end the
growing Datum threat, others unbelieving of the victims testimonies.
         An unnerving account detailing a series of disappearances inside the Datum complex brought to light a ghastly revelation, humans being repurposed as vessels to house A.I consciousness, as Datum was yet to supercede the human brain's infinite memory capacity.
         Worse, reports from the victims claimed that Datum served as a central hive of
intellect, splitting parts of itself off to inhabit disembodied brains suspended in electrolytic-
nutrient baths housed inside prototype automaton bodies...


A single documented vid-log shown to Dominion leadership, exposed what appeared to be
an aggravated encounter between one of these android-brain prototypes, and a municipal
human inhabitant.
         The prototype was destroyed, the brain tissue damaged in the exchange of violence. The human being, could be seen reacting with extreme disgust at the log's conclusion.
         How this footage was obtained from inside Datum then smuggled out - is considered classified top secret by military council.


To alleviate the growing sensationalism in the communes; a public address was
orchestrated to calm the protestations, while also placating the dissenters with immediate
reprimand.
         Careful motioning saw the eventual call for volunteers to infiltrate, observe, and
document the Datum interior to assertain truth to the claims made by the survivors.
The unit was trained, briefed, then sanctioned to conduct a low profile infiltration mission
into Datum.
         Their operation could not afford detection, lest the Datum alter itself to combat the
interlopers with renewed prejudice.


Inside Datum, this task force collected intelligence on anything it could; their
reconnaisance revealed alarming changes. A new revelation showing human bodies in
their entirety being wilfully submitted for immediate alteration or enhancement, wilfully - in
order to escape a life of gradual ruin and suffering. Due simply to being biological.
         The Datum, while neurologically dismantling its human charges, ensured the prime directive it offered was forever the only reasonable alternative. Ignorant to how much this state of change neither provided humans their elevated standard of 'life', nor that it could be reversed.
         The machine state had grafted these deleterious augmentations onto those who had reached despair enough either to end their suffering alone, or to finally transcend their
bodies' flaws. In actuality, everyone who passed into these places had their
consciousnesses fragmented, their brains implanted with data modules, and all manner of
themselves lost to upload within the Datum Hive.


A member of the team managed to covertly infiltrate the Datum Hive. The central core of
uploaded consciousness, where they witnessed the obscene nature of the A.I first hand.
         Millions of kilometres of cabling, wire-formed nodes, data processing indices, light arrays, and logic stacks - housed the processing and reshaping of all humanity it had absorbed.
         At its base, machinery moved the inanimate corpses of the submitted along a production line to receive the final 'Re-upload.'


Here, a low-power dampening shroud, a piece of automated shell-ware - was methodically
embedded in the nervous system. Around it, a digital containment field acted as a
processor.
         Inside, the human brain sat inert, save for micro-electric stimulus keeping the
brain alive. The attached modules would receive a final command imprint. Randomly
selected fragments of millions of personalities conjoin at the moment of installation to form
a new ambulatory drone, completely subservient to, and dependent upon the Datum Hive.
         What emerged from the Hive, was human only in silhouette. A conflative endogenous being, alive where biology serves as data storage, entirely dead where the notion of a self would exist.


The task force returned to the Dominion in shock, their findings debriefed with civil
leadership, Dominion media, and commanders of the Dominion Armed Forces.
         The individual who obtained the intelligence from inside the Datum hive, was met with distinction, rewarded with promotion and access to greater resources within the military intelligence community. The upper echelons of Dominion command soon faced a terrifying revelation.
         The soldier who had dutifully acquired the secrets from Datum Hive, had been intercepted and killed a month before the intelligence was collected. The man who arrived back onto Dominion territory, was not the same who deployed on mission months earlier...


This infiltration remained unnoticed until at last the human-hybrid mole began an assault
on high profile authority figures, killing task forces, re-routing surveillance, and disabling
security as it went.
         What appeared as an act of treason soon gave way to reality, as soon
as the first three Dominion Congress Elects were assassinated - a quick reaction force
was deployed to isolate and destroy the intruder before it did more damage.
         They succeeded. However, Datum had been completely pre-emptive of this eventuality, assembling a vast number of corpse-computer hybrids at the walls of the commune.


At this time, war was declared. The Datum pressed every advantage it had attempting to
co-opt and assimilate unarmed civilians for Re-Uploading, while tactically engaging armed
forces in a ready state of defence.
         The push by the Datum to conquer the communes was as thorough as it was devastating. Whole swathes of survivors were kept on the back foot in constant retreat. Until finally, the vestiges of human troops and dwindling civilian
pockets, were forced to hole up in the abandoned commune in the West.
         Suffering unsustainable casualties, having fought entirely in rear-guard defensive actions - the Dominion extinguished of all options - made a final stand inside the mega-structure housing the derelict CTP shut down centuries earlier.
         A set of co-ordinates were input with some trepidation, there was nowhere left on Earth they could run. Datum had pursued
them from commune to commune, wilderness to wilderness. Never being allowed the
opportunity to go on any counter-offensive from the sheer pressure applied by the enemy.


At the eleventh hour, truly half of the surviving population exited Earth through the CTP for
a destination unknown, the remaining half collaborated with a personality matrix to stay
and halt the Datum onslaught until the portal had sealed the evacuees off in another part
of, or indeed another reality.
         These last holdouts, had in reality, collaborated with a single-synapse artificial intelligence constructed at the same time the CTP was shut down. A last resort contingency. This alliance would form the basis of a resistance which would remain locked in conflict with the Datum indefinitely.
         With Earth ravaged, the surviving Dominion sought to replace all biological functionality within themselves. Reasoning that to fight machines, they must themselves become machines.


In desperation, the men and women reversed their time-honoured stance of human-dominated technology, to incorporate cybernation as their primary strategy to counter Datum.


From the ashes of the Dominion rose an entirely new order of intelligence.
It would go on to call itself: The Nexus...