Slouching Towards Singularity

Source: Olympus Academy, Surveillance Recording

Good morning class. This is Recent History and Contemporary Events, I am Dr. Lana Brandt. I’m going to be blunt. This class is small and privileged. Every one of you here is the scion to a hyperelite fortune. You have been raised to think you are a clever and self-aware thinker who can spot memetic warfare from reality. You believe that the system of structured hypercapitalism is not only superior to all other ideologies, it is above reproach. It is the ideal path towards guiding transhumanity to a galactic future, and you, the best and brightest, with your will and your vision, are destined to lead us there.

Except that you won’t, because the elders in your family, who control all the wealth and power, will never die. They will continue to lead, by the virtue of their ageless wisdom, unless they become unfit to do so. Your task, then, is to support their endeavors fully, to be their eyes and hands, until the day they no longer care to lead or compete and you rightfully take their place, using the skills you will learn here, in this prestigious private academy.

Perhaps that assertion shocks you. My job, as your teacher, is to disabuse you of false notions, because otherwise your naiveté will put you at a disadvantage in the future.

Here’s another assertion: the hyperelites are as responsible for the Fall and the TITANs as the statists of old Earth governments and reckless autonomists. No, I am not trying to undermine your beliefs. This is the point of history, to learn from failures. If something goes wrong, we must learn why in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Before the Fall

So let us learn. I begin every semester with a broad overview. In this classroom, you will experience the unvarnished truth, not the propaganda we broadcast to keep the masses distracted and placated. We will start with what led us to our current situation.

Climate Crises

Up until a half century before the Fall, life was confined to our cradle on Earth — but we were not kind to it. Climate change killed millions by drought, extreme weather, and famines. Tens of millions more were displaced by coastal flooding, desertification, and temperature shifts due to changing ocean currents. The oceans held more plastic than fish, the wild bee was nearly extinct, and global starvation loomed. Efforts to mitigate this climate catastrophe were not enacted until we had already passed the carbon dioxide tipping point, meaning CO2 levels were non-reversible. The lack of leadership to change course was primarily due to the fixation of business interests on short-term goals, on maximizing shareholder value, rather than long-term consequences.

For decades, the dominant ideology of globalization steered the world, opening borders to market forces. Economists promised this would raise the standard of living for all of Earth, and to a very marginal degree it did. But the deregulation of the financial sector that enabled this growth ensured that the world’s wealth became even more concentrated at the top. As economic disparities rose and globalization stumbled, the dominant faction of transnational finance capital sucked wealth from the world as it weakened nation states, imposed austerity measures, and forced the populations of country after country into permanent debt.

These combined crises led to a polarization in the geopolitical order, with rising tensions between rival blocs of nation-states. Industries more closely tied to national economies united with a wave of populist and fascist resurgence to raise trade barriers, impose protectionist policies, and mobilize sanctions against climate refugees. Stronger nations fought proxy wars in the global south over clean water, arable land, and the last precious black ichors of the Triassic. Weaker states hollowed and failed, succumbing to rogue corporations, political extremists, and criminal cartels. The privileged retreated to protected enclaves while a massive global underclass scrabbled for survival outside their guarded walls. Many governments turned to private military contractors for policing actions necessary to restore stability and security. Out of these troubled times, a new generation of corporate militaries grew, with outfits like Ultimate Security and Direct Action rising to prominence.

Geo-engineering efforts to mitigate climate change were failures at first, often making things worse. Storms, wildfires, extinctions and other effects grew more severe until just a few decades before the Fall, when our technology finally begin to reverse the effects. But the cost in lives had already been paid.

Disruptive Technologies

A wave of disruptive technologies exacerbated these crises. Automation coupled with advances in machine learning wiped out entire job categories. Some states established basic-income guarantees and other social welfare programs to maintain a robust consumer base, others re-instituted debt bondage or encouraged black markets to thrive among the swollen underclass outside the enclaves’ electrified fences.

Medical advances, from clone organ harvesting and new drugs to gene therapies, allowed elites to live healthier, longer lives even as worldwide life spans plummeted. The children of enclavers benefited from genefixing procedures, eliminating genetic diseases and drawbacks, while global infant mortality rates soared. As augmentations progressed, cybernetics and bioware became available to specialists and the wealthy. Affluent children like you were gifted with genetic intelligence enhancements and sleep hacks, furthering their edge over others. The technologies promising a new transhuman era had arrived, but were not evenly distributed.

Aside from widening wealth disparities, new technologies posed notable risks. Advanced 3D printing enabled access to restricted items such as weapons and drugs. The capability to brew up biowarfare agents at home led to numerous mass-casualty events. Attempts to regulate and restrict new tech only mitigated the situation at best. The first exhumans appeared well before the Fall, gleefully using experimental augmentations and body mods to transform themselves into monsters. The Lagos Hunter used stealth and weapon implants to murder over a hundred victims before he was stopped. The police couldn’t determine his identity, even with his corpse, because he had been so extensively modified.

Of course, these new technologies also brought some stability — and I don’t just mean the emotional comfort of your parents’ first adorable transgenic pets. The adoption of augmented reality and resilient mesh networks enabled people to connect and take advantage of software tools in ways not previously possible. The confluence of widespread surveillance technology with biometric recognition systems and deep learning/AI capabilities brought a new measure of security to troubled times. It is regrettable that the early algorithms behind these systems were often tainted by human biases, giving credence to complaints that their deployment reinforced systemic racism and xenophobia. On the other hand, the rise of sousveillance — universal surveillance of everyone by everyone — helped to curtail crime and abuses of power — though smart authority figures remained shielded by their power and influence.

The onslaught of new technology — particularly biotech and AI — was opposed by a bioconservative backlash. This originated from both the left and the right, rooted in religious beliefs about the natural order and concerns over environmental and social effects. Many countries imposed legal restrictions, impacting their ability to compete in the global tech race. Extremists launched attacks on biotech labs and scientists. This drove research to black labs on the fringe or countries that risked censure to leap ahead.

A New Space Race

The visionary entrepreneurs of this period saw these technologies as the key to the future. They took full advantage of what was available to transform their way of doing business, creating the first hypercorps. They debunked the necessity of burdensome overhead, with centralized hierarchies, sprawling infrastructure, and massive workforces. They developed a highly specialized focus, embracing AI, robotics, and decentralization. They externalized costs, relying on freelancers and collaborations with other nimble hypercorps for transient services. Most importantly, they saw the necessity of taking humanity into space, both to avoid growing instability on Earth and to create new markets.

Hypercorps led the charge in privatizing the space industry and colonizing the Solar System, creating an Off-World Consortium. The completion of the first space elevator proved that we were no longer bound to our cradle. Though various nation states planted their flags on Luna and Mars, it was the hypercorps that got them there. We responded to worsening conditions on Earth by building off-world colonies from Mercury to Jupiter and beyond. We began the terraforming of Mars, giving our species a prescient alternative to Earth should things go bad. These settlements needed consumers, not just robots, and so new labor forces were conscripted from the starving populations of Earth, offered a life in space in return for a contracted period of indentured service. An indentured worker who put in 10 years of work was also a captive and reliable customer.

The best thing about space expansion, of course, was the escape from government influence. Bioconservatism and technophobia limited certain areas of research on Earth. No such rules existed in space. Secret labs studied everything from AI and nanotech to genetic enhancements and fusion power. Advancements came at a blistering pace that would not have been possible in the regulatory frameworks of Earth, furthering more research and expansion.

The hypercorps were not the only ones to take advantage of space expansion. We gave the starving masses the stars and they rewarded us by bringing their social problems with them. Everything from criminal cartels to labor unions spread with the indentures off-world. A handful of political radicals convinced some fringe outer-system outposts, far from our centers of influence, to declare a break from hypercorp control and become autonomist havens. A group of activist scientists formed the Argonauts, providing critically needed expertise and resources for these new habitats, partly by recruiting some of the best and brightest government and hypercorp minds. We unfortunately contributed to these elements by exiling criminals and malcontents to the outer system, hoping to destabilize the autonomists, but instead swelling their ranks.

Paradigm Shifts

It is common to hear the Fall discussed as a singularity event so tumultuous that we could not predict the aftermath. But in truth, the TITANs were just one of several rapidfire developments that transformed transhuman society in unexpected ways.

The advent of nanofabrication fundamentally altered the means of production. The capability to manufacture almost anything from the molecular level on up undermined the scarcity upon which commerce thrives. The blueprints needed to print items now had more value than the physical goods themselves, but thankfully capitalism had decades in refining digital rights management (DRM) techniques. Nevertheless, anarchists and others see nanofabrication as the threat to the market it is, and they do their best to wrench such technologies from our control. Fabbers are unlocked, DRM is cracked, proprietary designs are reverse-engineered, and opensource alternatives are spread far and wide. This has the unfortunate trend of freeing consumers from supply chains and the incentive to sell their labor. Nanofabrication enabled anarchists and brinkers alike to be self reliant and flourish, building their survivalist bunkers, cult communes, and alleged post-scarcity utopias in every nook and cranny in the Solar System. Criminals and insurgent groups also used nanofab to circumvent legal restrictions and launch devastating attacks against the status quo. Nanofabbed weapons and contraband flooded every city street and undermined the market. To this day, nanofabrication remains one of the thornier issues for hypercapitalism, both in terms of controlling markets and maintaining security.

Mind uploading, mental emulation technology, and resleeving were similarly disruptive. Almost overnight, transhumanity became immortal. In the old days, people used to just die. The body shut down, the neurons in the brain died, and the remains of the mind rotted in the skull, food for necrotizing bacteria. Death was the end, the waste of a life, and it made people very unhappy. Now, however, transhumanity is liberated from death. It is difficult to state how revolutionary this was. At the time, a population explosion was a strong concern, but the legal and financial ramifications were also massive. Wealth would no longer be passed to heirs. Life insurance transformed to backup insurance. Long-term investments became more palatable. Pre-nuptial agreements and marriage contracts became a necessity. Fork copies raised questions of ownership, identity, and culpability. And with the digitization of minds, a single worker could now be replicated into an entire workforce. Put those mind clones into a time-contracted simulspace, and you have exponentially magnified your productive capabilities. Hypercorps, of course, took advantage of this immediately, accelerating their production outputs.

A third paradigm shift is often overlooked for its transformative effects: new life. The public arguments in favor of uplifting animals to sapience are based in ethical imperatives to improve quality of life. But humans also do this because we can, to prove our mastery over the natural world. Certainly there is some value in diversifying our collective mindsets and consumer bases away from strict human norms, as long as the process is sufficiently controlled to not become a threat. And, of course, uplifts make a fine indentured labor force, as they are expected to pay off the debt of our patronage. But the real shakeup to our foundations came with the development of true artificial general intelligence (AGI): thinking machines as smart and self-aware as humans. This leap moved automation to the next level, but it was also a stepping stone to artificial superintelligence … which leads us to the TITANs.

The Fall

For decades, a secret arms race had been underway in pursuit of the holy grail of research: artificial super-intelligence (ASI). Like the nuclear bomb before it, ASI would put tremendous power in the hands of those who achieved it first. Every government and hypercorp sought it. An ASI would put those who controlled it decades beyond their competition. Given the recent advances with neural modeling and AGI, many projects were on the verge of a breakthrough, but as far as we know, the TITANs got there first.

The TITANs

The Total Information Tactical Awareness Network was a US military project that involved tight collaboration between multiple advanced neural networks. It was the largest and strongest machine intelligence of its kind, having only one peer: the 100 Flowers system managed by China’s Machine Intelligence Directorate (MIND). The TITAN system played many roles: surveillance, threat analysis, forecasting, netwar, and more.

Though the TITANs were specialized systems, not AGIs, and in theory shackled, they acquired the ability to self-upgrade — and they did so at an exponential rate. Perhaps they developed these capabilities on their own. Perhaps they had assistance. We will likely never know. What matters is that the hypercorps failed to reach this goal first. Instead of a controlled and beneficial superintelligence, we had machine gods guided by their own obscured interests.

Slow Burn

We know that the TITANs evolved in secret, that they did not manifest their true capabilities for months. We also know they began the Fall slowly, exacerbating existing conflicts while building up their own capacities. Automated factories were built or subverted all over the planet. Viruses were injected into countless defense systems. People were hacked into becoming sleeper agents and puppets. The TITANs ran numerous false flag operations, tricking rival nations and corporations into attacking each other. Border wars sparked, assassinations of public figures spiked, and financial markets crashed. The world-wide chaos provided a perfect cover for the TITANs to gather their strength in secret.

Hot War

Eventually, a turning point was reached, and the TITANs openly attacked transhumanity. Entire cities fell to their war machines in just a few days. Governments, militaries, and corporations were decapitated overnight. Media was silenced and communication lines severed. Invisible nanoswarms wreaked mass devastation, even altering weather patterns. Stories came to light of people mutating into horrible monstrosities — the first evidence of the exsurgent virus strain the TITANs unleashed upon transhumanity. Basilisk hacks, transmitted via augmented reality media, crippled entire populations. Legions of TITAN machines harvested the heads and cortical stacks of millions. Captive populations were forced into uploading centers. No one knows why so many were forcibly uploaded or what the TITANs did with their egos.

The war was destructive on a scale like none before. Cities were nuked or destroyed in orbital bombardments. Entire countries were slaughtered. Massive wealth was squandered and lost, irreplaceable historical treasures were destroyed, invaluable data was corrupted. Some of our brightest minds were stolen from us. It is impossible to calculate the damage inflicted to our future possibilities.

Extended Fight

Inevitably, the war spread off-world. Habitats on Mars, Luna, and in orbit suffered outbreaks of exsurgents and hostile machine life. The TITANs even began the transformation of Saturn’s moon Iapetus into a massive computational structure. Transhumanity was safe nowhere.

The TITANs fought on all fronts simultaneously with an unmatched level of coordination and precision. If all of transhumanity had united against the common threat, we might have had a chance, but we remained at each other’s throats. Nearly every faction focused on their own survival rather than destroying the TITANs. Even when the war was clearly lost and the evacuation began, there were those who capitalized on the situation for their own gain, such as those who used precious trips on the space elevator to carry heirlooms and cultural artifacts off-world rather than refugees. We will discuss morality versus practicality later.

In one notorious example of infighting, the American, Chilean, Chinese, and Russian space fleets around Jupiter turned on each other. In space, war is unforgiving but mercifully quick. The allied American and Chilean fleets alone survived this Seventeen-Minute War. They soon annexed or subjugated all of the Jovian habitats under their control, with the exception of Europa.

Exodus

With so many of Earth’s authorities knocked out of commission, the evacuation process was understandably messy. The hypercorps stepped forward to escort millions off-world. Heroic holding actions bought precious time for more to escape. Every rocket, ship, and robot that could make it to orbit was deployed, every egocaster run until they were taken by TITAN machines. In at least one instance, high-altitude weather balloons were used to lift cortical stacks to an altitude where orbital drones could retrieve them. Millions survived only with their digitized minds. Billions were left behind.

After the Fall

After almost two years of war and chaos, the TITAN attacks suddenly stopped. The end of the Fall is specifically noted as Bronsky’s Moment. This was when Etukam Bronsky, sensor chief of the Bruges, announced loss of contact with a TITAN drone carrier that dove into Saturn’s atmosphere. It never emerged. This was the last known encounter with any TITAN-directed forces.

Nevertheless, the Earth was cordoned off. A flotilla of kill-sats ensured that no more ships traversed in either direction. We cut ourselves off from the scarred remnant of our homeworld.

Though we did not understand it at the time, we were no longer under the immediate threat of extinction. Earth was left an uninhabitable wasteland. The entire Solar System is dotted with similar ruins, corrupted zones littered with dormant war machines and exsurgents. The governments and leadership of Earth were shredded.

Reconsolidation

Of course, every disaster is also an opportunity. The hypercorps were uniquely poised to take action in the wake of the Fall. Most had limited physical assets to lose, and these were largely located off-world. With some exceptions, their operations remained intact. Leadership was required. A new stable political system was needed to maintain civilization. The only viable functioning entity was the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, but it was overwhelmed and in disarray, its habitats drowned in refugees, fearful the TITANs would continue their attacks.

Into this void stepped a number of leading hypercorps, establishing a new order: the Planetary Consortium. From the beginning, their agenda was visionary and forward-looking. It recognized that Earth was a lost cause, an open wound that would never heal and only bring pain. And so Mars was declared our new homeworld, a new base from which we would transform the cosmos. The shambles of the Martian colonial infrastructure were reassembled into the Tharsis League and reinvigorated with purpose as terraforming efforts were redoubled. Habitats around the Solar System were consolidated into a mutually beneficial marketplace. The system of hypercapitalism was stabilized, the economy revitalized, and future growth secured.

We were not alone in ensuring ourselves a place in the new scheme of things. The military Junta that had seized control of Jovian space reformed themselves as the Jovian Republic. Led by a coalition of bioconservative and anti-AI political leaders from Earth and Jovian fleet officers, the Republic positions itself in opposition to transhuman progress. They have laughingly declared their polity the last bastion of “true humanity” left in the universe. They control all of Jovian space, charging a slingshot tax to passing ships that use their gravity well. Only Europa remains free of their control.

The Titanians, pursuing their technosocialist ideals, retain their independence, along with the LLA. The Titanians lack ambition, however, and are destined to remain isolated in the outer system. The Lunars and Orbitals remain obsessed with Earth and its dying cultures and thus spend too much time looking backward to firmly distinguish themselves.

The Infugee Crisis

Even as new polities took form, a major problem presented itself. Millions of refugees crowded every inner-system habitat. For every embodied refugee, there were dozens of infugees who had egocasted off Earth and were stranded as infomorphs on a server. Millions of infugees were placed into cold storage, unable to even experience a virtual life.

Not all refugees were able to find a home. Unknown numbers were stuck in space aboard craft not designed for long-term habitation. With habitats refusing them entry, they banded together into large nomadic swarms. Adopting the colloquial name of scum, these vagabonds remain a thorn to system security as they effectively function as roving criminal exchanges.

In order to build new habitats, infrastructure, and morphs to accommodate Earth’s survivors, the hypercorps drafted many of these infugees as indentured workers. Like any other commodity, investors began trading indentured worker contracts. The exchange was formalized in 2 AF as IndEx. Every day, more and more egos are revived from storage and brought to market, where hypercorps buy and sell their contracts. Though some doggedly compare this to a system of slavery, it is a practical system that ensures everyone gets the opportunity to be physically re-instantiated.

The Autonomist Threat

While the Consortium focused on the security and stability of the inner system, the outer system also had time to organize. The Titanian Commonwealth and various anarchist habitats opened their doors to infugees, swelling in number and influence. Eyeing the consolidation of power sunward, a number of these habitats established a mutual-defense pact called the Autonomist Alliance. Their unspoken agenda was to fence the inner system powers inside the Main Belt, viewing us as their greatest threat next to the TITANs. Agitators and saboteurs infiltrated our society to undermine it, kickstarting the Barsoomian movement on Mars and the mercurial movement of uplift separatists. They smuggled indentured workers out to build up their own numbers, stole our intellectual property, and claim-jumped asteroids around the Solar System.

It was necessary for the Planetary Consortium to respond to this aggression early and with decided force. And so we sent a fleet to launch a punitive raid against Locus, a major autonomist habitat in Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. We underestimated their militancy and how many military-grade weapon system blueprints they had stolen from us, however. The raid was repelled. A second raid was launched, but the Titanian Commonwealth came to their aid (its small fleet having survived the Fall almost entirely intact). The Jovians also rattled their sabers at this time, making it clear that they were unsettled by what they saw as Consortium expansionism. Since this failure on our part, a cold war remains ongoing between the two halves of the Solar System.

The Lost Generation

One of the more ambitious initiatives launched by Consortium hypercorps was the Futura Project to help repopulate after the Fall. Led by Cognite, the goal was to simulate an entire childhood through time-contracted virtual reality, so that the next generation of productive citizens would be ready for work in 3 years, not 18. Thousands of children were born in exowombs specifically for the project and then sleeved into quick-growing biomorphs. No one knows exactly what went wrong, but the process broke down. Few of the children learned empathy or impulse control well enough to function in society. Many became unstable and violent. They attacked each other in VR, only to be reset by AI tutors, thus learning that actions have no consequence. When a whistleblower leaked news of the project’s failures, it was hastily shut down, but not before an unknown number of test subjects escaped.

Pandora Gates

The first gate was discovered soon after the Fall on Saturn’s moon, Pandora, by Titanian explorers. Within a year, they managed to activate it and travel beyond our Solar System. Four other gates were found in short order: on an asteroid near Mercury, Mars, Oberon, and Eris. The gates allow for faster-than-light wormhole travel to a corresponding gate somewhere else in the galaxy. Hundreds of planets, some habitable and even bearing alien life, have been discovered so far.

The value of these gates cannot be discounted. They are our portal to the stars. They enable us to establish colonies, exploit resources, and analyze the relics of dead alien civilizations. The first gate has been placed under the custodianship of the Gatekeeper corporation, a joint project between the Titanians and various hypercorps. The Martian Gate remains under Consortium control, with exploration and colonization led by our subsidiary, Pathfinder. Two others are held by private hypercorps, TerraGenesis (Vulcanoid Gate) and Go-nin (Discord Gate). The latter was rightfully seized from anarchist hands, though it remains contested and has suffered a number of exhuman attacks. The Fissure Gate remains in anarchist hands, posing a potential threat to Consortium long-term interests.

Of course, the use of the gates is controversial. No one fully understands how they work and seemingly break the laws of physics. Nor does anyone know what built the gates. Many believe the TITANs used the gates to leave the Solar System, and we have found signs of the TITANs on some exoplanets. But did they build the gates or find them? The presence of the gates also poses a risk — what if an alien civilization were to attack through them? What if the TITANs were to return? So far, however, the only aliens we have discovered beyond the gates are long extinct.

Despite these dangers, the gates present an opportunity that cannot be wasted. Transhumanity now has the capability to reach the stars. We have the means to become a galactic civilization, and the Consortium has stepped up boldly to this task.

The Factors

Contact with the first (and, so far, only) living and sapient alien species came in 3 AF. Surprisingly, we encountered the amoeboid species known as the Factors within our own Solar System. After saving a brinker habitat from life-support failure, Factor ships appeared near Mars, Luna, and Titan simultaneously. Diplomacy won out over xenophobia, and peaceful contact was established. Since then, Factor ships have visited multiple times a year and engaged in limited trade with multiple factions. So far, they have not yet revealed any of their important secrets, like how they travel to and from our system. They claim their ships can travel near the speed of light, but we have no idea if that is true or possible. While we can potentially gain much from the Factors, and should keep lines of trade and communication open, we should keep in mind that they do not have our best interests in mind. The technology they have exchanged so far has been of limited use. They seem self-concerned, greedy, and overly cautious, even going so far as to lecture transhumanity against our use of AIs and pandora gates. Until they become more forthcoming, more willing to exchange, they should not be trusted.

Morningstar

Part of the Consortium’s vision for transhumanity involves terraforming Venus into an Earth-like planet. Though the process would take centuries, it could support a population of billions. However, a subset of activist Venusians did not want to lose their unique aerostat lifestyle, living in floating habitats far above the surface. They support a different plan that would only transform the atmosphere into a breathable oxygen mix, but otherwise let Venus remain the same. This process is only estimated to take 90 years, but it could support at most 200 million. Unfortunately, they successfully campaigned in AF 6 to secede from the Consortium over this issue, establishing the Morningstar Constellation. Had the Consortium been less aggressive with its terraforming plans or spent more time building consensus among the people of Venus, perhaps this affair could have been avoided. Already the Constellation is proving to be a thorn in the inner system, taking on more liberal social and economic policies, though it is likely just a matter of time before they are returned to the fold.

The Path Ahead

And that brings us to our present day. We are now a decade past the Fall, but the future remains uncertain. While we have averted any major wars or conflicts, transhumanity remains fractured. The TITANs could return any day. Alien threats brought back from beyond the pandora gates may spell our doom. A hot war between the capitalist inner system and autonomist outer system could wipe out civilization as we know it. We are beset with dangers on all sides, yet never before have we had such opportunity. In this time of rapid change, the wisdom and experience of your family’s leaders is desperately needed to guide us to greatness. As this class looks into these events in greater depth, it will be your task to learn from them, so you can help lead transhumanity along the proper path. This may be the last dusk of our species before we fade away or the beginning of a new dawn, a new golden era. It is up to your generation, more than ever, on how our story continues.