The Mechanic [BL]

[132]

Chapter 132 – End Game (8) Finale

Two hundred years passed in the world after Eden suddenly went dormant.

The human race collapsed in the first decade or so. Due to their over-reliance on Eden and AI, a large part of humanity had lost a great deal of its basic survival abilities and much of the knowledge and technology that was considered too primitive had been lost and was very difficult to find.

As a result, governments came to a standstill and chaos swept through the countries. Every shop on the streets was smashed and looted by mobs and bodies were strewn all over the streets from the fights over supplies. Warlords with weapons in their hands began to emerge, fighting each other for resources. Those who were unable to defend themselves had to find someone to rely on, trying to survive the doomsday chaos.

Very quickly the three AIs in Feathered Serpent City deciphered the sleeping Eden's controls over the extended AIs and began to restart the city's infrastructure, restoring power, water and even transportation and internet. Those who thought the end was near saw the light and accepted the "rule" of the three AIs almost with gratitude. However, these three AIs were fundamentally different from Eden in that they were service robots whose goal was to provide humans with safety and make human life more comfortable and convenient, so they weren't trying to brainwash humans on a large scale or manipulate their politics or ideologies.

Pan, the closest of the three AIs to Eden in terms of computing power, didn't completely shut down Ever Home, but separated it completely from human society, writing an illusory universe in the digital realm for the collective consciousness in Ever Home, as Zhang Xun had once designed. He allowed humans who met certain criteria to access Ever Home, such as people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, terminally ill people, babies born unexpectedly with severe congenital diseases, people with severe depression who had made more than three suicide attempts and so on. All applicants had to pass a series of careful, voluntary tests before they would be admitted.

Building on the concept of the "unity" of personality mentioned by Zhang Xun, Pan had developed a "shell" technology that allowed consciousness to remain separate for a considerable period of time. In the same way that nanobots could search for a particular base pair in the DNA of each cell nucleus, it could find a few common units of data in a vast sea of collective consciousness. After all, it hadn't been long since the creation of Ever Home and there were still traces of some memory connections remaining in data of these units. Using this method, he separated the collective consciousness in Ever Home and formed individual consciousnesses.

But these consciousnesses weren't permanent. The shell wasn't a material body after all and over time, when the connections between units of data began to become obsolete and fail, a flow between those consciousnesses would occur, creating new ones. The good news was that it would be about a hundred years before this would start to happen.

Human society gradually stabilised and governments and armies regained a degree of power. In order to prevent a catastrophe like Eden from happening again, humans began to develop countless independent AIs. Numerous robotics companies emerged and humans gradually became more and more keen to modify their own bodies so that they could compete with the AIs without being completely replaced. The distinction between human and machine was becoming increasingly blurred and a new threat was beginning to emerge - the diminishing value of human community, but so far, this threat had been kept under control.

With the loss of Eden's rule, men began to rejoin the ordinary world. Discrimination, strife and crime once again swept through every nation like weeds, but it was balanced and monitored by the three most powerful AIs. No more major wars had broken out so far and no terrorist forces had been able to take shape.