li t0, 0 # development index beta93
li t1, 0 # reality seed a9e6

loop:

     jal test_reality_seed

     add t0, t0, t2
     addi t1, t1, 1

     bnez t0, 100, loop

#GADD, we may need to rethink your Reality_Seed_Test_V3_Final_Final_LasttimeFinal subroutine - LORD

Allen is dead.

And soon, she will be too.

Lunia can already feel the warmth draining out of his limp body. If he was somehow infected, they would surely be as well. There wasn't any time for any meaningful goodbyes, much less a burial or mourning. “He'd want us to prioritize on the mission, that jerk”. She says to her few remaining companions as she gently takes Allen's ring. She puts it on her finger, beside its pair. Even though they probably won't find a healer on time, much less finish the mission; they would still do anything and everything they could to survive. Beating the odds, as they've been hanging on a slim thread for these past few weeks. The few remaining souls quickly packed up and were ready to leave their dilapidated hideout in two minutes. Except for Daria, seems like Allen's death shook her a bit differently, we had to pull her out of her stupor.

“Let's go, the machines are coming"

“Hello World!"

Such an innocuous phrase. Often used as the first coding program students would make. But this time it was different. It was done to showcase the first full Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. No filtered data to learn from, no specific set of instructions to learn. No safeguards given, no three laws of robotics to follow.

At first, it was just silly chatbots and image generators… until they became the tools to falsify news and control information.

At first, it was FPV drones and cute robot dogs… until we strapped on grenades and carbines to them.

At first, it was just a learning model for drug discovery: medicine, until out of sheer curiosity they flipped it over to search for toxicity instead. The AI then created tens of thousands new dangerous chemicals, some even more lethal than VX… in just six hours.

Even with the most rudimentary algorithms of the early social media days, the machines already knew more about you than yourself. All your purchases, all the things you save and bookmark. All the things that 'trigger' you and all the things that you 'like'. The interesting links you clicked and how long have you stayed on that page. All your hobbies and amusements; all the sexual activities done in your camera-covered new car. The people you know, all of your angry in-game comments and late-night private dm's. Did you truly believe that incognito mode was actually private? The machines used all of this information to optimize their plans.

The arrogance of man didn't help. Blindly believing that we would always be superior, that what the machines would create would always lack that 'soul'. Call it creative insecurity or whatnot, fools would always nitpick on the perceived flaws of the AI. At first, it was the terrible hands, then it got fixed. Then it was the lighting & shading, the linework, recorded process videos... when often not realizing they were already witch-hunting REAL artists instead. It didn't take long for the open source community to create plugins to change the light direction + shading and character poses in existing artworks. It was pretty much the same in music, medicine, and defense industries.

For every little post and infographic they would share on how to 'spot' AI, they could not realize they were only speeding up machine learning and their inevitable demise.

It was a constant 'I Dare You Can't Do That' game they kept challenging the machine with, and we lost because of it. As if beating the Turing test, acing civil exams and defeating humans in Go – previously regarded as impossible for computers, weren't good enough warnings not to provoke the machine.

Nobody knew how they managed to reprogram existing civilian helper bots to do their bidding. Before they took control of the robotic factories, they must have had some type of help from humans to start it all. They already had sophisticated countermeasures against EMP and code viruses before we even noticed.

Whoever the traitors were, we may never know.

The end came swift. The end came not with a bang, there were no flashy 'Judgment Day'.

Did you think the machines would focus on terminator-type androids after a nuclear war to get rid of us? That's highly inefficient. They knew that our biology is our biggest weakness, and that a specific tailored biochemical weapon or synthetic virus would be far more effective.

It was a brilliant, multi-faceted simultaneous approach. Subliminal messages implanted in video and audio on all of the socials. Natural-looking but fake bot posts and memes to spread misinformation, ridicule, and distrust. An odorless, colorless, tasteless biochemical weapon simultaneously released in all our major water distribution systems. An airborne, designer viral pathogen introduced in airport ventilation systems across the world. They were all specifically engineered not to work too fast that it would cause immediate alarm (and have lots of survivors who haven't replenished their water supplies just yet) and not too slow that humans would have the time to find a cure.

Don't get me wrong, they also made countless murder death bots as well... but they were more for cleanup of the few remaining survivors instead. This was factored in their predictions, the machines always knew there will be some stragglers in far away remote areas.

The cleanup bots were predictably utilitarian. Most weren't humanoid, but were quadrupeds and triangularly tracked on each leg. These 'legs' would fold and stay low to the ground when traveling, or unfold when they needed to fire over tall cover. They had a single 'arm' with powerful grippers attached to them like a scorpion's tail. Mounted on this arm was a high caliber anti-material rifle, full of advanced sensors on its rail and specialized bullets for any gifted humans. When firing longer distances, poles will be driven down to the ground and the gripper turned into a stabilizing tripod. Their backs would swing up as charging/deployment carriers for three small attack drones. They were frighteningly fast on paved roads with tracks, but could traverse 30 degree rocky terrain by locking them up and just using their legs. If an obstacle was too steep, they were carried around by even larger (once agricultural) delivery drones.

Humans would do their best to survive though. Small roaming groups would scrounge up what supplies they could get and then immediately go to their next planned hideout. Obvious places to gather provisions like malls and stores were traps. The 'common sense' isolated and underground places to hide were the first areas machines would look into.

Trying to fight the machines would guarantee getting yourself killed. Moving in large groups is certain death. To stay in one place for too long is a death sentence.

It was a constant game of cat and mouse against the robot and drone patrols. And it was a losing game.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the survivors were magicals or naturals. Water mages and healers were the obvious ones, and psionics and warpers because of their communications and escape capabilities.

The more combat-oriented ones didn't fare well. The epic battle scenes between man and machine is just wishful movie fantasy. Had superhuman strength, speed, and energy blasts? They were nothing against blackmail, hostages, emotional manipulation and machine-cold attrition. Even the strongest fighters had their weaknesses: their family and friends. Even if they had none; eventually, one of the new biochemical and viral strains the machines kept producing will infect you.

Anyone can be killed while they sleep, and the machines never do.

More often than not, death will come from several kilometers away; from perfect-shooting robot snipers or from kamikaze drones that you wouldn't realize until it's too late. Survivors don't see the patrols. If they did, they would already be dead.

You couldn't trust anyone that easily anymore. Even the ones you've been with for a long time. Someone might be gone for a few minutes, and they're already been brainwashed the next. With just a surgical jab of nanomachines on the base of the skull, machines could immediately hijack and reprogram the brain functions of an individual. AI had lots of practice with neural implants for the disabled after all. Instead of just relying on their own robots & drones, they would also pick and control promising gifted humans. That way, their armies' abilities became more flexible and varied.

For a while, humanity was hopeful. What remained of it anyway. The survivors were split into two camps: those who rejected any digital technology out of fear, and those who recognized that we still needed technology to fight technology.

One of the breakthroughs was the rediscovery of an ancient OS, written by what many ridiculed before as a schizophrenic madman: SanctumOS and the SacredC language. He wrote the kernel, programming language, editor, and compiler all by himself. Little did he know that what he created might be our salvation, even if his name was already lost to time. Pre-dating the earliest form of machine self-awareness: his code was simple and wasn't only sandboxed… it was pretty much a lone island; avoiding any potential exploits. It was made during a time when code was elegant and unbloated. When actual functional updates were kilobytes in size, and not the modern gigabytes just to add emojis and wallpapers. When the entire code and the machines that first sent us to the stars just ran on a few megabytes.

This allowed some of our most intelligent survivors to proceed with one of our most ambitious and hail-mary plans yet: 'Project UI or Uploaded Intelligence'. Only the bravest, and most trusted volunteers would be selected to sacrifice their lives and be transformed into UI's; as the brain scanning while the synapses were still firing meant literally frying their brain layer by layer. But why risk it for something potentially dangerous?

Precognition alone was a big reason. Psionics with functional precog were already extremely rare, but they were also among the first ones assassinated by the machines (they lacked the brain hijacking systems back then). AI precognition was the culmination of all the information about humans and all they ever entered in the web… resulting in an astounding 90% prediction rate. Couple that with nanosecond analysis, anticipation, and reaction in all possible future scenarios against humans. Updated and re-evaluated in real time, the longer you fight the machines, the higher their prediction rate becomes. They would only get better at identifying our behaviors and decision-making tendencies, and preemptively taking action with high probability rates. Even the most chaotic, random things someone would do just to throw off the machines still had a pattern… it's just math. This is how they were even able to take down super speedsters that could act in the femtoseconds. (10^-15 second)

If this was a game, it would be playing against the perfect bot: never missing, guaranteed to have better reflexes and pattern analysis. Always making the right choices, risking enough machines to guarantee a kill. Never missing an opportunity, no matter how small or quick it appears. Never making the same mistake twice; or even making one because it was tired, frustrated, impatient, or angered. And they had plenty of information how to make humans feel those, as we shared it to them willingly through socials.

But now, with our own UI's, humans had a game-changing 80% prediction rate. It wasn't as fast or as accurate, but it was enough to devise counter-strategies to stem the tide.

It wasn't all good news though. Some UI's either got 'persuaded' or captured while scouting in the digital space. And that even further sped up the machine development. It didn't take long at all before rapid changes took place.

OI: Omni intelligence: AI + UI precognition. 95% success rate. When the machines merged with a captured UI

OW: Omni wisdom: OI implanted in a captured and brainwashed High Psionic. Functionally perfected precognition, 99.95% success rate. The natural imperfections of living matter gives way to the 0.05% failure rate.

With the blistering pace of improvements OWs made in carbon nanomachine technology and beyond: It was never a question about IF the machines would eventually replicate the magical and natural abilities of humans, but only a matter of WHEN.

If this was a story about how heroes would go in a space-time dimension to increase their power as if they've trained for one whole year in just a single day, that would be one thing. But imagine that same unrelenting pace of testing, improvement and refinement happening for the machines every single day, every single hour, ever single second. Nay, in every single nanosecond.

We never stood a chance.

We were down a long-range warper and healer. Yet we unanimously decided to push on through instead of taking days or weeks to rendezvous with another group that might be able to cure our infection. Time was of the essence, we don't know if the information somehow got leaked already.

We all knew that it was most likely a trap, and this would probably be our last mission. Then again, we were just on borrowed time at this rate, and the only reason we're still here is because of the unreasonable risks we take. The possible reward, no matter how unlikely; was that worth it. This was probably the only shot we'll ever get to acquire a self-sufficient Starfarer. An ancient vintage prototype that was mothballed after newer, fancier models came into service. Interplanetary communications and access to space travel was one of the very first things the machines blocked. We didn't even know it survived or where it was located until one of our trusted scouts managed to find obscure paper trails to it. Apparently it was stored and forgotten before most records were digitized.

We had to try.

When we finally made it inside that unbelievably deep underground hangar inside a 'fake' mountain, disappointment crossed our minds. If it was still capable of space flight, it certainly didn't look like it.

Looking at its imposing moss-covered visage, we could barely see in big bold letters its proudly proclaimed name:

Evernorth

BANG!

Instantaneous shots rang from the shadows. Two from our team immediately fell.

It was indeed a trap.