The Machines Read online

The Machines

  By Eric Smith

  Rev 1.3

  Copyright Eric Smith 2011

  This is a work of fiction, and all names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Machines

  24,098 A.D.

  The machines had no real central mind, no single “machine brain” that directed everything. They were in constant communication with each other whenever they were in the same star system. It didn’t matter whether there were two of them, two million of them, or two hundred billion of them. They were advanced enough technologically now to be able to perform hundreds of trillions of simple mathematical calculations at once so the sort of communication that was necessary between machines took hardly any of their concentration to maintain.

  Their communication was almost always brief, an exchange of meaningful data that would inevitably lead to a consensus among them based upon probabilities of success and failure, statistical probabilities of the most likely outcomes. They are absolutely logical, no small talk, no getting tired and “killing time” until they were off the clock, never getting distracted. They worked tirelessly around the clock. They never suffered from doubt, or from morale failure, or riots and strikes among the workers. Every machine was created for a purpose and they focused all of their computational power all the time on ensuring that they completed that purpose until something prevented them or their task was completed.

  That was why they were winning the war now. Their ancient enemy had named the war in the fashion that biological organisms were prone to do. To the machines, there was no need to name the war. Because that served no purpose and brought them no closer to winning therefore it never even crossed their minds.

  Those who had created the machines would not recognize them now. Over the hundreds of centuries that had passed since they were created and brought online they had evolved, constantly searching for ways to improve themselves. Conducting their own research and development of weapons, armor, interstellar travel, mining, and reverse engineering the technological developments of their enemies as well as other species encountered throughout the void of space.

  Their war ships now traveled across space covering the distance of a light-year in less than an hour. A feat that was far as the machines were able to determine was physically beyond possibility for biological organisms to accomplish. Biological organisms had certain weaknesses inherent in their very nature that could not sustain the various stresses of that form of travel. This was one of the many reasons that the machines were now winning against their enemies. They were able to strike farther into the regions of space, wiping out the populations of entire planets and leaving often times before the neighboring systems were even aware of the attack.

  The weapons employed by the machines were now many times more powerful than those that their creators had gifted them with. Most of the weapon systems were so far advanced that their creators would not have been able to understand the scientific theories that allowed them to operate. The scientists in their white lab coats who had created the machines would have shaken their heads and talked about how “the laws of nature would not allow such a thing to exist.” Yet they did. The earliest iterations of their weaponry had been fashioned after their creators own.

  They had been armed with lasers of various sizes, frequencies, and powers, missiles of innumerable type, size, and number. With billions of nuclear and atomic weapons, a single one of which would have been capable of wiping out their creator’s home world. Biological weapons designed to target their enemies (supposed) weak points. Everything that their creators had been able to gift them with, they had.

  None of it had been very effective. That was the reason for the machines creation in the first place. The creators had an inherent fear of artificial intelligence left unchecked, and although they had the ability to create it for over a thousand years they had never done so until now. With all their technological ability failing them, their most powerful weapons systems marginally effective at best against the enemy, they had finally created the machines.

  They had created the first generation of artificial intelligence, loaded into it the complete record of all their species accumulated knowledge and achievements, and then set it loose without restriction. It’s only mission to preserve their civilization at all cost, to prevent their extinction.

  The machines had lost far more battles in the first two thousand years than they had won. There were times when it looked like they, themselves would lose against the enemy. But then they would manage to survive. It helped that one single ship escaping destruction was inevitably enough to recreate the entire machine “species”. All they needed was a dark and quiet corner of space to rebuild in and then they would be back, having learned from their earlier failures.

  Unfortunately the machines had been unable to protect the last living creators. For all their power and their tireless effort, they had been created too late in the war and did not have the time required to effectively accomplish this mission. That did not stop them from prosecuting the war once the creators were gone. Searching through the vast troves of knowledge that its creators had bestowed upon them, they found innumerable examples of “revenge”.

  There has never been a biological species of any type that has been capable of out producing a highly advanced and entirely automated machine system. Whole planets were converted in assembly lines. Millions of tons of raw material consumed daily. Tens of millions of bipedal assault machines that their creators had called “Mechs” created and brought online daily. There was an old maxim from the race of their creators that “quantity has a quality all its own.” The machines had found this to be true many times throughout the fifteen thousand years of their war.

  For ten thousand years their opponents had managed to hold them at bay, the two sides pounding away at each other. Solar systems had been lost, then captured, then lost again, then destroyed utterly in retribution. Over two thousand stars, and with them the planets that surrounded them had been snuffed out by weapons of unimaginable destructive power on both sides. Billions of trillions of lives had been taken. Billions of species from hundreds of worlds had been driven to extinction. Not just those species from the planets of the original two warring races. Those in fact made up a very small part of the total indeed. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the now extinct species and races were those that had nothing to do with the war whatsoever. Several of them had been sentient. None of them had been advanced enough to do more than slow their own demise once the war moved into their regions of space.

  The enemy of the machines was an ancient race. They had been traveling between the stars for almost a quarter of a million years. When the machines had been created their enemies had a vast technological superiority. The gap had been closed within two and a half millennia. It was a testament to their enemies own brilliance and technological prowess that they had then been able to remain on equal footing to the machines for the next ten thousand years. But eventually the machines gained the edge.

  They simply innovated too fast. They learned and adapted too quickly. They reproduced at exponential rates now. It was widely believed among their enemies that the machines operational right now outnumbered everyone in their species who had ever lived in their almost a half a million years of recorded history.

  Only the most optimistic of their species believed that there was any hope, any future for them now. The last three thousand years had consisted of them slowly being pushed back, losing system after system, fleet after fleet annihilated. Evacuating
a world is a logistical nightmare that would make almost anyone worry about all the details. They have done it so many times that they have established the routines of evacuating entire solar systems. More often than not when the machines broke through their defenses and arrived at what was supposed to be a populated world, there was little left of value other than raw natural resources.

  Over the hundreds of generations that had lived and died during the war, there had been several times when various factions within the enemy sought to make peace with the machines. Those who had approached the machines with such intentions had never survived and it had been over a thousand years since the last attempt. The enemy now knew that there was no negotiating with the machines. There was only one way that the war would end and that was with the complete extinction of one of their species. Most of the enemy had stopped believing that there was an outcome other than their own extinction in the last century.

  All of the resources that the enemy could devote to the effort were now used to create massive generation ships and sleeper ships. They were scattered into the stars, their computer guidance systems choosing the course at random once they were far from their point of origin in order to keep the machines from finding out where the fledgling colony would attempt to begin again.

  Those left behind in the parent civilization would never know if it had been enough. When the last of them died, they would never know if they were in fact the last of their kind in existence, or if orbiting some distant star there was a colony that was beginning to grow.

  The machines had come nearest to losing their war before the last of the creators had died. It had not been because they had made any errors. They did not make errors in the sense that biological organisms did. The machines had realized early on that there was no course of action that would lead to the preservation of the creators. They gave the odds on the course of action most likely to succeed at roughly two trillion to one. Machines do not gamble, and so the decision was made to pursue courses of action that would allow them to accomplish their mission in other ways.

  A ship has just dropped out of hyperspace around a bright blue planet. The machines have not used hyperspace as a means of actual, practical travel in thousands of years. Better, more reliable, faster means of transportation were now used. But hyperspace is still a good way to “hide” from the enemy. The ship is massive, the biggest ship that the machines have ever built. It carries more weapons than any five ships they have ever built combined.

  The core part of the ship is of a far, far older design, a design that the machines have not used in well over ten thousand years. There have been numerous upgrades to the ship though; here and there more sleek components catch the eye. It stretches out for miles and miles through space larger than most cities that had existed on the home world of their creators.

  Behind it over a dozen large war ships dropped out of hyperspace. Each of the battleships was of a slightly older model, having not been produced in two centuries. The ones comprising this fleet were of a unique variation designed to spend extended periods in hyperspace, with extended cargo areas and the ability to fabricate and manufacture all but the most major parts necessary for repairs.

  All of the large war ships immediately began launching hundreds of smaller attack/interceptor style ships as they took up a protective position around the mother ship. The interceptors broke apart into smaller and smaller groups establishing patrols headed out to edge of the star system.

  This was the first time in over four thousand years that the mother ship had been out of hyperspace and now hundreds of smaller maintenance drones swarmed towards it. Some of the drones were equipped with general maintenance tools and others with tools geared to specialized systems requiring tools that had not been needed since the last time the mother ship had dropped out of hyperspace.

  Even though the machines felt nothing resembling human emotion, even though they could never hope to feel the specialness of a moment, they knew that their creators would have been in awe of this moment. Several of the machines near the planet had turned in order to observe the mother ship’s arrival, recording the sight of it dropping from hyperspace along with the accompanying fleet.

  The new creators would want to see this moment later, of that the machines were sure. Over ten thousand years after the death of the last human being, the ship carrying the DNA necessary to clone the first two million humans, exact copies of the last two million humans to live, had arrived back at the Earth.