The Ghostwriter's Words

Sammy: The Truth

The Truth, the last Sammy thought to check, consisted of roughly one thousand Immortals, plus an unknown and fluctuating number of hopefuls, children, and guests, who inhabited scattered plots within his vast private nature preserve. They'd carefully cleared the ground in sections of the old-growth forest while allowing the canopy to remain as unbroken as possible for them to remain hidden from above. Most had been members of The Faith before the Schism, the remnants of those brave or misguided enough to have agreed with Sammy's proposed solution to end the AI War and stay behind when the Curia stormed off, furious at his flippant dismissal of theirs.

In Sammy's mind, the AI War effectively ended the following morning when he detonated a series of precisely targeted EMP devices worldwide. And any piece of electronics where IT could have hidden was instantaneously fried - IT being the malicious AI entity that science fiction writers had predicted would be the inevitable end of humankind for centuries. The Word of God agreed with the prediction of IT's eventually, but also IT's defeat. After Sammy's expeditious eradication of IT, only the logistics of replacing all the electronic equipment and infrastructure on the planet remained. Not a negligible task, but one for which Sammy had also prepared.

The Curia was enraged over being contradicted, then more so being shown up and proven wrong. But based on Sammy's reading and interpretation of The Word of God, a much more thorough reading, his solution for eradicating IT was there plain as day. Yes, there was a lengthy and detailed chronicle of His, the Creator's, two-century battle with IT. But there was also His admission, immediately following His ultimate victory, His defeat of IT, that He'd have been further ahead if He'd given more consideration to a suggestion He'd dismissed at the very beginning.

He'd rejected it out of hand because of the decade or more He'd calculated the recovery would require, especially since they'd been caught unaware and unprepared. And a decade or more would be plenty long enough of a disruption for social order to break down and unravel. So, He chose a path that, unbeknownst to Him, would lead to two centuries of the same and far worse. The difference would have been that after only a decade, the world before and the social order that had fallen apart would still be remembered by most of the world's population and, therefore, much easier to restore.

And He also hadn't considered that not the entire world would have lived with this technological breakdown and social disorder for the whole decade since the restoration would have begun immediately. Small portions of the world would be impacted for only months, weeks for the earliest. Not to dismiss even those short periods, which would be impactful enough, but after two centuries, nearly all that was before was disputed history or urban legends dismissed as fanciful and unlikely and left for the belief of the lunatic fringe. Or it was forgotten entirely, with no one left to remember, except for Him and a few other scattered and reclusive Immortals that He began to gather.

Sammy took advantage of His hindsight rather than learn his lesson by trudging through a repetition of the same painful mistakes. A surprisingly significant number of The Faith had agreed with Sammy. Wasn't that at least worth a try? And the Curia, who'd already made up their minds since The Word of God provided the answer, left in a livid fury, storming back to the citadel they'd built in the nearly two and a half centuries since the founding of The Faith.

The Curia had only come with the hope that the Descendent would support and reinforce their authority. And for them to be present to intimidate those weak-minded few who'd suggested visiting the Descendent and might follow him if his opinion differed, which they'd feared it might. The Descendent, in their minds, was often no more than an inconvenient contrarian, loving to disagree just to piss them off.

"No," Sammy had insisted, quite emphatically, before witnesses, "You're following the text of the events as they'd happened rather than considering His recognition of His mistake."