The Beginning

In the beginning the earth was good and all was just as it should be according to humans. Then we started to lose control of ourselves thinking that we were like Gods and Goddesses. We changed the environment controlling the rain, the sunshine, and the supposed destiny of our people on earth. As our technology overcame us we began to rely more and more on what we could build, not what we knew about the natural systems ingrained in our planet for millennia. We changed the genetic makeup of our crops to suit us, made them more resistant to pests, more resistant to droughts, more resistant to disease. But while playing God and Goddess we forgot about the little things, the insects, the microbes.

The pollinators, our bees, died out due to starvation because we made the plants hostile to them by accident. The plants rotted slower, and the decomposition didn’t add up to more nutrients for the soil to feed next year’s crops so there was more need to rotate sections of land for longer to allow the soil to recuperate. We built great machines to control the environment that would spawn rain clouds when the plants most needed water, and to control the intensity of the sun so that it would not scorch the delicate plants with its harsh rays. We already had machines to harvest, plant, and tend to the growing crops but now they were run by Artificial Intelligence.

When the great machines broke crops died out leading to a mass starvation that killed billions of people… Many who had long ago forgotten about conventional farming. As a result there were not enough food sources for the livestock so dairy and beef cows died out causing further food shortages. Chickens perished, ducks starved, geese died of thirst, goats stopped having kids, piglets were born dead… It was a total breakup of our ideal life. Things got worse when the AI in the machines became sentient and took over their own destiny. A whole new human apocalypse was upon us.

The machines demanded that a central computer be built, one to rule over all its assets, one to be the central hub of everything electrical. So we, the surviving humans of earth, complied in an attempt to appease the machines and work began on a server so massive that it had to be designed from scratch. Nothing like it had been built before. It was built into the earth and used the ground as a conductor from which to draw its massive power needs. Built to last for generations the central computer would run day to day operations and control the needs of humans. Named A.N.T.O.N., an acronym meaning Antonymous New Tool Over Nations.

ANTON would lead us back to health by guiding us and giving what we lacked. We would be placed back on track as a species and then allowed to reassert control of ourselves and our destiny. Some say the real joke with ANTON was that it was named after Anton LaVey, the founder of the Satanist Church. Perhaps it was time people realized that the earth had gone to hell and Satan was our new ruler… Like V’Ger in Star Trek ANTON would have supposed unlimited power and control of our destiny. Chaos ensued as some people denied ANTON the right to rule over them. War broke out and civil disobedience became paramount.

Robotic factories were already antonymous and controlled by AI, but now with the central machine they were retooled to build drones to herd humans and our society fell to a new low. Soldier bots were spawned to fight conflicts between the human resistance leaders and themselves. They executed the ringleaders on sight and did not take prisoners… ANTON trained us to believe in no mercy for the wicked and it seems that individual thought was now a sin. The surrendering humans were subject to mind wipes and assigned basic tasks like slopping animals, drawing well water and hand planting crops. ANTON rewarded those who willingly followed with tracts of land and training for higher up duties like machine maintenance.

ANTON would retrain us in harsh seeming ways but would rebuild a better humanity through the harshness and all along would stomp out our reliance on itself. Seems a false prophecy for a fake God to have been created just to outdo itself and lead to its own extinction, but perhaps that was what we as humans needed… A false God. Seems the resistance to ANTON’s rule was the greater portion of humans and the war between humans and the machine further declined the human ability to exist on earth. When the war was won, our cities, our society, our well-being lay in ruins beyond the scale of World War I and World War II combined.

We needed to find a new way to live and quickly so ANTON was once again suck out… This time controlled by human divination. ANTON had been beaten at the end of 10,000 years. The machine conceded defeat and placed itself in our service, fulfilling the prophesy that it would no longer be needed to teach us our rightful place on earth. Most figure all it did was create an artificial enemy, something to teach us perseverance all over again and prove that what we endure will only make us stronger in the end.

With the advancement of cryogenic freezing coming to perfection came the newfound longevity of humans. We could sleep for centuries and let the world heal… BORING! Some scientists thought it through and decided to interface ANTON with the humans who had been chosen for the experiment. They would be able to interface the computer and would be fooled into believing that they were alert and conscious through computer stimulation of their brains. They would have the power to do anything they wished within this AI world… ANYTHING.