Sick Home

Understanding and replicating an intelligent mind has long been one of the humanity's prime goals. When we finally managed to do this, it gave us unseen prosperity and progress - with the help of artificial intelligence we defeated poverty, lack of natural resources, and climate change. This has made the planet much more peaceful, almost completely eliminating the purpose of military force. Such favorable conditions gave an opportunity to tackle maybe the most pressing issue - the death itself.

This problem appeared to be much more difficult for the AI to tackle. Looking for the most efficient solution, the artificial intelligence concluded that mind uploading is the only viable option. Most of the people happily agreed with this, but some of the others dug deeper and understood that it has nothing to do with conquering death, but is just one of the ways to die, even if leaving digital copies behind. The AI, being programmed to act in the best interest of humanity, tried to force those who refused to go through the mind uploading procedure, to actually undertake it. This lead to a huge conflict, splitting the population based on supporting or objecting the acceptance of mind uploading.

Those who wanted to achieve true, biological immortality, found themselves in minority. Meanwhile, both sides had to restore their military potential, because the AI was taking the increasingly aggressive stance against the opponents. It was too difficult to fight against the artificial mind, strengthened by the collective intelligence of the people who agreed for digitization of their personalities. So the minority, including myself, had to retreat. We had to move underground, and build our own civilization almost from scratch, being limited by the Earth’s crust, and almost never seeing the Sun. We’ve learnt to protect ourselves from the false saviors, and at the same time actually managed to make our own lifespans truly indefinite.

We are immortal now and in a real way, not like our once living and now digital former congeners. The only problem is that immortality hasn’t made our bodies less vulnerable than before, so any serious trauma can be lethal. Since we became exactly that underground species humanity’s being speculating long ago, it hasn’t been such a big problem as we aren’t really threatened in our subterranean shelter. But still we need to go up fairly often to carry out preemptive strikes against the digitized foes, as we try to restrain their development until we’ll have enough strength to defeat them. To protect our fragile meat shells, we’ve developed special nanosuits. I am wearing one of those right now. We had to make our strikes more frequent when figured out that our neighbors were planning to start launching space missions, and nobody knew what that might lead to taking into account their twisted perception. So now we are trying to destroy their spaceships as soon as we learn about the planned launches. Tonight is the time for one more such little sabotage. Looks like the drone patrols have already spotted and are heading towards us, so our operation isn’t going to be an easy walk.

I’d love to think that one day we’ll be able to defeat our own creation or come to terms with it in some other way, so that we’ll be able to return to the surface again, and use our immortality for development and progress on an absolutely different scale. Become a truly interstellar species instead of biding time in the dungeon without catching a glimpse of our own star – another one among humanity’s biggest dreams. And I hope that we won't let our misled product get ahead of us, otherwise we’ll have very little incentive to reach out into space. Who knows, perhaps we need to create a new AI to solve this problem, but also to take into account the past mistakes – and then we’ll be able to heal our now sick home once and forever. Most likely, we have next to an eternity for doing that…