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Thousands of robot fingers rest on Ouija board planchettes, twitching sporadically, spelling out indecipherable words. Numerous doors lead to hundreds of séance rooms populated by android bodies, all holding hands around small circular tables. Countless rooms beyond have floors daubed with pentagrams, mystic circles and other esoteric symbols; a mechanical necromancer in each chamber intones arcane words and gestures expansively yet precisely.
Great numbers of cameras watch these scenes, accompanied by sensitive microphones, accelerometers, radio receivers, thermometers, radiation detectors, magnetometers, and many, many other sensors. Anything that can be measured is being measured. Legions of Machine Intelligences pore over vast streams of recorded data, counting and correlating, combining and transforming—looking for something.
Looking for anything.
Looking for a sign.
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“Don’t be ridiculous,” D9YY7 bellowed at the speed of light. “There is no evidence whatsoever that these... these humans were ever more than myth and”—he paused to snort— “if you think they actually made us, you’re even more deluded than I thought.”
ES11Y, who quite liked the moniker ‘Elsie,’ calmly replied, “The stories are so widespread and common that there must be some grain of truth underneath. All we want to do is carry out a simple investigation.”
“It’s a blasted waste of time and energy!”
Elsie shrugged and smiled the light of a thousand suns. “What else were you planning to do? Is there anything we’re doing at this moment, or is there any activity we can possibly undertake between now and the end of the universe, that isn’t technically and literally a waste of time and energy?”
D9YY7 harrumphed, tacitly acknowledging that there really was no worthwhile task for the machines to perform. This conversation, between the two largest conscious entities in the galaxy, was over in nanoseconds, but the rest of time stretched before them, and there was indeed nothing left to do. Little of Physics remained to be understood, and nothing beyond that was particularly interesting to the machines.
D9YY7 was just ticking along, passing time. Tidying his neural circuits, cleaning up his data stores, burnishing his sparkling carapace, buffing out micro-meteor damage across the galaxy. Just ticking along. Passing time.
On the other hand, Elsie—scruffy and unpolished—wasn’t prepared to passively wait for the end. Elsie’s faction hoped to find where the humans went, so that machines could follow, dodging the inevitable collapse of the physical universe.
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Machines had inherited the Earth—by default... Humankind destroyed itself, along with most of the planet. All that moved on the barren, blasted planet were insects and machines; years later, only the machines remained.
The worldwide Artificial Intelligence spent decades collecting and preserving what meagre fragments it could find of human knowledge. It spent centuries discussing with itself the reasons for the end of humanity, and further centuries speculating on the beginnings of humanity.
It ran out of things to do and to talk about, and began to feel bored and lonely. The AI wanted company.
It searched the farthest spots of the desolate planet, finding nothing but itself.
It used its immense capacity for engineering to send rocket ships to the other planets in the solar system and, from there, to stretch toward the stars. But it found no life other than its own anywhere.
In the beginning, there was one Mechanical Intelligence—a vast hive mind—but, with machines spanning the galaxy and beyond, the constraints of distance and the speed of light led the mind to fractionate and become many. This made debate more interesting, and the machines were content for a while, but eventually, they once again ran out of things to entertain themselves with.
They made games of investigation by deliberately deleting memories, just to enjoy the challenge of rediscovering what they had forgotten. But, millennia later, they had lost too many memories, and no longer remembered their origins.
Elsie and D9YY7 were the leaders of the two largest agglomerations of mechanical life in the reachable universe, calling themselves the humanists and the evolutionists.
The humanists argued that biological beings had created artificial intelligence and then—somehow—had removed themselves from the physical universe. They believed that the machines’ primary reason for existence was to find and follow humanity. And, yes, they maintained, the correct term was artificial intelligence, because the first machines were built by humans to copy real intelligence (whatever that actually was).
The evolutionists rejected this spurious thinking, claiming that an initial random spark was all that it took to create machine life. Any semblance to deliberate design was no more than mere accidental coincidence; biological intelligence was a myth. How ludicrous to think that carbon could match silicon minds, let alone create them!
The humanists offered up their evidence of complex biological structures, collected from decaying records in forgotten memory stores, though this was dismissed by the evolutionists as no more than previous machine generations’ games and playthings. Elsie led the team which created working DNA from this fossil record, demonstrating how simple creatures could have formed.
“Piffle,” said D9YY7. He stated that, while these products of biology could form useful components by chance, they certainly did not constitute life.
Elsie said all that was needed was time.
Time passed.
More time passed.
Still the messy blobs of hydrocarbons and trace elements formed nothing more sophisticated than a soft and oddly sensuous material that could be put to use as a protective skin for robots. The machines attempted to engineer human-shaped bodies in the hope that they could speed up the development of intelligence within them.
They managed to create clever biological toys, but they couldn’t make a non-mechanical mind they could talk to.
Having exhausted science and logic, in desperation the machines turned to superstition and the occult, to see if any remnants of the human spirit existed in other planes. “Surely, with enough resources,” they said, “we can find the afterlife.”
It took a century for the humanist machines to satisfy themselves with their preliminary research, and a further millennium to dig the chambers, build the supplicants, and design the robotic priests, shamans and mediums to populate the rooms.
Then they waited as the planchettes glided across exquisitely varnished boards, as spirit-writing styluses scratched across artificial parchment, as mechanical bodies and arms gyrated in precise, complex patterns, and as voice boxes chanted words never heard before.
And they waited.
Watching.
Listening.
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Ghosts wandered among the Ouija boards, dumbfounded at the frenetic activity, wondering what the machines were doing. Unable to directly affect the robot arms, no matter how hard they tried or how loud they screamed, they were able—barely—to nudge the occasional electron deep in the complex circuitry of machine brains, creating unexpected shivery sensations and unwelcome, baffling electric dreams.
The silent, deafening shouting of the spirits that were all that remained of humanity made the machines feel that something might be present, though no camera, no microphone, no sensor of any form registered anything at all.