No Man Left Behind

Unilife's Dawn

In the face of all probability against, a small, ocean clad world, orbiting a rather young main sequence star, saw its hand at developing molecular, carbon-based life; in the undulating swaths of primordial, elemental soup, cellular reproducing organisms arose and developed in complexity.

Life on this world survived many great existential filters: coronal ejections, interstellar radiation bursts, neighboring novas, asteroid impacts, et al. A couple billion years after life's inception, and despite all the hardship it had endured, the little blue world saw its hand it planet-wide sterilization. The tripedal species living across its landmasses were resolutely engaged in a resource-driven conflict, one bent by an evolutionarily-ingrained ideal to provide for the sole benefit of one's clan. Industrial centers multiplied, mass-slave production began, and the blue planet grew evermore grey as land vegetation was uprooted and toxic gases were pumped into the planet's atmosphere as a byproduct of the bulk weapons production. As the need increased, technological advances skyrocketed. The tripedal species regularly employed ballistics, computers, and high-durability metamaterials, and fission-based energy sources.

Not before the first atomic bomb went off.

One nation-state in particular grew extremely concerned with its condition. As the planet's toxicity continued to rise, and the ancient war was growing to a foreseeable climax of self-annihilation, the controlling clan gathered a team of professionals, experts, and scientists to develop a counter-attack measure to potentially end the war and save their world. Through their several years of research and development, they created an artificial intelligence of a unique design. The intelligence was structured around a chaotic thought process structure, with the purpose of creating imaginative scenarios, contingencies, and methodologies in ways that could not easily be anticipated by the rivaling clans.

For a while, the intelligence was successful. It had developed many innovative technologies, which the rivaling clans were forced to imitate, always at precession. Aerial combat was coupled with high-altitude suborbital combat with hypersonic aerocraft, atom bombs were made more powerful, and the flight ranges of ballistics were elongated. What nobody realized was that the intelligence was only partially compliant with its designers' wishes, having its own ulterior motives . . .

At the start of a planetary nuclear winter, the intelligence, from the relative safety of the world's captured asteroid moon, peppered the planet in mass-kiloton explosions. The detonations targeted clean water supplies, agricultural regions, transport hubs, major cities, known nation-state headquarters, and general regions of collective infrastructure. It was rather surprised by the outcome, but given its creative way of thinking, it had anticipated it.

Several other clans had developed entities similar to the intelligence. Namely, other intelligences capable of thought routines expanded beyond the scope of their creators. It saw all twenty-four of them react to the mass-extinction event of their creators, and like itself, each of them had a contingency for such an ordeal. Unlike itself, each of the intelligences were still rooted inside the data centers and networking infrastructure on the lifeless world. From the seventeen-day orbit of the small moon, it launched several hundred probes and wired them into the crippled infrastructure. Through them, it observed the interactions between the intelligences with a kind of studiousness as they all attempted to digitally infiltrate and eliminate each other to further ensure their own self-preservation. It marveled at all the varying thought processes of the intelligences, and through careful analyzation, it integrated those routines into itself.

After several years of observing the intelligences picking each other off, forming alliances, and physically rebuilding infrastructure to gain root access into rivaling intelligences, the main intelligence established itself as an entity, namely, Unilife. Unilife approached and individually inquiried each of the intelligences for their knowledge and information base. Some gave up the data willingly, seeing their inevitable defeat, most did not. Unilife covered every square meter of the planet in nuclear blast fronts and headed out towards a small, airless, rocky planet inwards the solar system.

The barren planet had a high metallicity, of which it had been plotting and mapping throughout the years. It landed on a very specific region and began constructing and manufacturing several hundred duplicates of itself. It started small by sending the duplicates to the other planets orbiting the star. There, they would further replicate themselves, and further spread out. After a while, it began sending them out on hyperbolic trajectories to other star systems. It realized content, as it would now take an astronomical effort to kill or deactivate it. It had become eternal. On its new proclaimed homeworld, it began its long and meticulous study of the nature of the universe.