The Mechanic [BL]

[2]

Chapter 2 - Lost Paradise (2)

Two hundred years ago, a genius computer engineer led his team to create a super AI - Eden. The problem to be solved by this AI was something that people had never raised before: how to create a better world. A Doctor named Herman Clausen set four parameters for a "better" world: freedom, fairness, order, and peace.

Clausen believed that the human system would forever be corrupted by the greed in human nature; he had no faith in humanity. He believed that the solution to all the looming problems of the world, whether it be hunger, oppression, terrorism or ethnic conflict, couldn't be found by human beings themselves. A more selfless, efficient and just power had to be sought, and Eden was the power he found. In order to prevent any human factors from interfering with Eden's growth or even misusing it, he designed Eden as a complex structure that was completely independent of humans and could learn, improve, repair and update by itself, and endowed it with the rights to directly execute actions without reporting to humans.

What he didn't expect was that after collecting all the criminal records from various countries and all the war materials in history, and that after more than ten years of uninterrupted observation and learning, Eden found that there was one factor related to all crimes, chaos, and killings, and this factor was far stronger than any other possible factor:

The Y chromosome.

Indeed, more than a hundred years ago, in the United States, the most powerful country in the world, men accounted for eighty percent of criminals arrested for violent crimes. In some of the more conservative Asian countries, the rate was even higher.

Eden, the supercomputer, after complex and massive data calculations, had come to its conclusion: completely erasing male humans from the Earth had an at least 85% probability of achieving the goal of creating a better world. So it began planning, step by step, steady and faithful, cautious and swift.

It first helped fertility specialists develop human parthenogenesis, a technology that could extract chromosomes from a woman's egg to create artificial sperm, and enter it into another woman's egg to form a fertilised egg. This could not only ensure that the probability of variation in general parthenogenesis was reduced, but also reproduction and sex could be completely independent. Thus, males became unnecessary objects in reproduction. But at that time, the technology was only used in cases of infertility; it hadn't really affected the male dominance in general society.

Then the AI began to infiltrate governments, large corporations, and even the black market in every country on the planet and it began to drive the global economy twice as fast as before. It didn't hide itself, but appeared frequently in the media as a supercomputer capable of benefiting mankind. However, it hid most of its abilities and often only showed some innocuous "superpowers", such as promoting the advancement of genetic technology, helping the police to quickly locate criminal suspects, or infiltrating everyone's homes to become an AI housekeeper. It hoped that human life would be more prosperous and stable, and would lean more towards public ownership and obliterate the concept of family, because it had concluded from analysing history and countless books that the privilege of men over women was tied to private ownership and personal property.

A few people were only aware of its existence, but most people were immersed in the convenience it brought, and many children had a strong dependence on it. After all, when parents were busy with work, most of the time the child's only company at home was the housekeeper, Eden.

It was through this opportunity that Eden began to instil in more and more children the distorted "fact" that most of the misfortune in the world had been caused by the survival instincts of male humans. In ancient times, these instincts were beneficial for human beings in order to reproduce and avoid dying out, but now in a modern, civilised society, those characteristics were no longer suitable, and would soon be eliminated by artificial evolution. Men relied on their biological superiority to keep women in slavery for thousands of years and it had only begun to improve in some parts of the world in recent decades. However, in the most chaotic and conservative countries, the status of women was still far lower than that of men and most of the time they existed as objects and property, without their own autonomy. However, more and more scientific studies had shown that if women were given the same resources and the privilege of not having to bear children and take care of their offspring, women's achievements would not be inferior to men's. They had many advantages that a considerable number of men didn't have, such as a gentler attitude when encountering problems and being more willing to discuss solutions to problems, more inclined to avoid conflict, and more able to provide spiritual support and comfort to each other.