Unfortunately, it has also wiped clean the banquet of the living entirely. It has wiped the human race off the face of the planet. Built to logically destroy the "enemy" as swiftly and sweetly as a superior intelligence could manage, in the Most Perfect of All worlds, the unholy trinity of the merged one-mind AM had done just that. Because the Final War has broken out, and in a matter of a few days AM has done the perfect job of fulfilling the purpose for which its separate parts were created.
and a few decades from now we learn that AM isn't gone at all. No trick at all to pretend to wink out and go to sleep for good. Which was no trick to an entity that had burrowed through hundreds of thousands of miles of solid rock to link its three lobes decades before. AM had given every indication it was dead. Stick a fork in 'em, kid, because they're done.īut AM had gone way past that point of vulnerability. The CIA was put out of big time business and instructed that the Allied Mastercomputer be shut down, that the subterranean complex be sealed over with iridium-laced concrete, and all input to the sensory banks be destroyed. The Russians turned theirs off because they had no more rubles to pour down that bottomless shaft. The Chinese had thought they'd turned off their computer. I think, therefore I AM.Īnd the first thing AM did was carry out the Prime Directive. the tree poisonous brothers, the three deranged sisters, the three computers. and because they had been programmed by fallible humans not to create, not to love, not to uplift, but to plot murder.they did just that. All of it.Īnd finally, the machines expanded so much, became so capable of building and refitting themselves, grew so wise and potent, that they sensed one another. Every war ever fought, every campaign, every incursion, every holy crusade. From Aquinas to Zola, from archaeology to zoology, from America to Zaire. Louis by a crazed ex-postal worker with an Uzi. Five point six miles straight down, under the weight of the world.Īnd they were all put in operative mode, and were fed everything there was to know about the human race, from our first murder by crushing the skull of a fellow pithecanthropoid with a bit of igneous rock, to the recent mass slaughter at a McDonald's in East St. The American computer, co-sponsored by Great Britain and Israel and other "interested" nations, named the Allied Mastercomputer (or AM, for short), was hidden beneath the Rockies. Six point three miles deep, far from the prying eyes of U2 flyovers and tectonic scans. The Russian mechanism in all its awesome complexity went to the deep well beneath the Urals. Five miles down, protected from the heat of the Earth's motel core. The Chinese computer was sunk in the frozen Manchurian steppes. What none of us knew was that during the years 1945 to 1989, the three great superpowers had set in motion secret projects that would permit vast subterranean complexes of self-repairing computers to wage a global war too complex for mere human brains to oversee.
No more threat of war, and the world moved forward into a new age of thousands of brushfire wars in countries no one had ever even heard of. But all that ended and the threat of nuclear holocaust blew away as lightly as the tabloids that fueled the paranoia. For most of the 20th century the human race lived in a state of repressed panic and diminution of personal freedoms. Cold war paranoia and hysteria dominated the civilized world in one form or another from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the crumbling of the Berlin wall in 1989.
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