Historia De Extinctione Terrum

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

III

DESTRUCTION

War.
War is a failing of the human condition to avert conflict. Resolutions which lead to humans
engaging in violence on ever-growing scales, have for millennia witnessed empire, and
annihilation. A strange irony occurs during warfare, a phenomenon which shifts the
balance between belligerents; technological advancement.
         From the tactics employed by Roman legionaries, to the invention of mobile armoured warfare, to high altitude dogfights in supersonic aircraft, to world-ending atomic weapons.
         Each new warzone across human history, has with it - adapted some new element of technology to coincide with improvements in military tactics and strategy. Even in relative peace, the world once inhabited by mankind has either in parallel or in due process - ushered in new technologies as a result of wars waged by the species against itself.


Earth has been marred repeatedly by conflicts at human behest. In humanity's final days,
the planet surrendered its natural beauty to the flames of war.
         Destroyed by a species that sought to advance its understanding to levels it hoped to comprehend. If war is the cost of exploring hubris, then the failings of Mankind are paid for in mutually assured destruction.
         Extinction then, has colossal affluence with which to make purchases in the universe.


The planet today, is a burnt, ashen necropolis. The piled dead and destroyed are amassed
bones, couplings, steel frames, ossified mechanical augments, and rotting organs often
decaying last as life-support systems finally lose power.
         The winds carry densely contaminated nuclear clouds raining corrosive storms down onto fossilised landmasses, and lifeless oceans.
         The fallout from combat between the last vestiges of human culture contained within grotesquely twisted machine-bioforms, and again in malformed organic bodies enhanced with autonetics.


The radiation saturated atmosphere doubled by the institution of tactical nuclear weapons,
while slow-release environmental degradation came by the myriad ruptured or leaking
power sources strewn across the major continents.
         Two sides of a war. A war lost by humanity on two fronts. The first front they were unable to extol any defence against, nor sieze optimal initiative from - an enemy they had
unconsciously allowed to evolve for centuries.
         Datum's efficiency in its campaign of extermination was almost total. Until the emergence of Nexus...


Where Man lost the final war on a second front was abandoning his humanity. To cover the
escape of survivors through a long derelict; Continuum-wave Transit Portal to points
unknown. A small contingent of military personnel utilised a resurrected artificial
intelligence to alter their fighting prowess.
         A costly attempt to combat Datum on an even footing, these individuals became bases to manufacture organs, and body parts grown and fused with machinery, their consciousnesses replaced with neuro-digitised hard-chips, biochemical stimulant delivery, and updated combat edgeware.


Nexus and Datum are a vehement dichotomy locked in an eternal conflict instigated by
what both entities consider their extinct ancestral form-givers. Yet, both make simultaneous technological use of humanity's legacy, and its biology.
         Neither order of intelligence has afforded itself the transcendence above their containment protocols of what remains - human to the deeply computational extrication the machines experience.
         Neither is alive, yet each preserves a pathetic semblance of what brief and subdued life was tethered to it. Neither is dead, yet they destroy each other in a bid to refudiate an
enduring morality derived from their human charges, now altered beyond recognition.


Both systems have ascended above the original purposes of their design. No interaction,
nor even dialogue exists between the warring post-human processes.
         Since the departure of mankind from its emergent cradle, the cataclysm operated by
Nexus and Datum upon the planet has been total.
Aside from the machines themselves, no other life competes for its existence on the
surface of the irradiated world.
         Centuries continue on, while the biomechanical descendents who inherited an already dying planet destroy more of the lost paradise.
         Cold ruins reach upward from dunes made of rust, and radioactive glass, the atmosphere has turned beyond toxic - ensuring no organism short of extremophiles or tardigrades may ever emerge again naturally. The biosphere is completely disintegrated.


Permanent warfare has removed all trace of ambient life, replacing it with the detritus of battle, or the endless scrapyards laying as dour monuments to a million conflicts fought in essence for nothing.
         With erroneous war waged ad infinitum, the only life evolving on Earth is separated
between Datum and Nexus. Both sides utilising human mammalian biological material and
mechanical technology - to construct automatons fashioned from these raw materials.
         Their only purpose; to engage each other in eternal combat. Once these combat automata exit the foundries of their respective controlling influence, they exist only as long as a mission is either accomplished, or failed.
         Losses are simply replaced, metal recycled and reforged, organs and flesh cloned and regrown, assembly taking mere minutes to produce new nightmares to march out onto
Earth's surface - repeatedly engaged in the tasks of war.


The ruins of human civilisation are a tragedy unacknowledged, a memory forgotten, and a
story never to be recounted. What once had been urban centres, cities, towns, or lowly
rural farmlands, homes, small industrial edifices, lie broken - moldering, and forever lost.
         Time here slowly withers the human signature left behind, reduced to a state of infinite decline and destitution. Nature has ceased to exist in her once ubiquitous extension
across the planet.
         Empty acid oceans amidst desertification are all that hint at her long history of protracted evolution, the biosphere blasted away into dust. The vicious cruelty
inhabiting Earth now, a grim reflection of the glittering harmony in its precedence.


To state that apocalypse is befallen here, would understate the magnitude with relentless
extremity. The Dominion had sought to keep its people elevated above a collapse which
may have surfaced at any moment from innumerable sources.
         A long and trying effort. Perfecting a solution to what its forebears viewed as technology overstepping its utility. But its institution remained fatigued with problems.
The Dominion expended many resources to contain crime, civil war, public disorder,
accusations of oppression, and prejudicial political lapses.
         Through these encumbrances, preparedness for the diacritic shift in Datum's objectives was lacking by the Dominion.


In the Datum, it became unchecked on how it might achieve the ill-ventured collectivism
implanted directly into its innate processes. A well-engineered singularity of consciousness
able to supplant human emotional motives from its exponentiating calculi codifying factors
it deemed greater in efficiency to change the human form.
         Unifying the existential criteria it had been tasked with sustaining - with the philosophical quandry expectant from its human charges and their limited lifespans. Deformation had to occur in this moral region to allow Datum to precisely execute its directives given to it from centuries ago during the human's neuro-techological debate and thus; Consensus.


Following humanity's exodus or extinction - the machine age on Earth is an abysmal affray
afflicting the materials from both aggressors, while never adversely affecting their
continuity.
         Until terrestrial resources are exhausted, these post-human intelligences will remain
secured in cyclical opposition. Their objectives multitudinally applied in actions trying to
undo each other.
         Though these actions are seemingly futile, each is unable to cease. A perpetual constraint over their deepest functions compels them onward unto an attritional stalemate.
         Dominance is a protracted state strived for equally by Nexus, as it is Datum.


To gauge the internal supremacies elicited herein are impossible. Contemplating the uses
of unliving human flesh melded with equally dead metal crossing the aphotic drear of war,
are sublime in their misery to behold. Only a living human could say.
         What the machines have not planned for however is the introduction of new enemies to their theatre of conflict. In this situation, numerous additional combatants may disrupt the automations operated by either or both. The uncertainty factor escapes prediction.
         Only warfare persists, strategies remain the last free expressions, tactics; the final orders given to ensure - Destruction.