Wow, everyone, things are going full throttle behind the scenes on getting Rise of the Dark AI launched over at Ream. I’ve been selecting art, formatting blurbs, and revisiting my manuscript all this week in-between writing new material for my various projects. I should be burning out, but right now I find it energizing. It’s like wrapping presents and putting them under the Christmas tree, I can hardly wait until everyone can see what’s inside.
Last week, I told you about the story’s origin. This week is a quick overview of the world they inhabit.
Background Influences
My favorite space opera stories, especially ones that include big ideas, are the ones by Ian M. Banks and Neil Asher. These are far future societies with super intelligent AIs and humans who are either living in a utopia or dystopia, depending on their point of view. They’re usually in a kind of post-scarcity culture. Meaning that, much like Star Trek’s Federation, nobody goes wanting for anything. (Except when they don’t.)
Ian M. Banks had the Culture, where the AIs served the humans and aliens and other lesser machine intelligences in the same way you might have a benevolent dictators looking after the best interests of all their subjects. And of course, since everything worked perfectly well, all the great Culture stories would spend as little time as needed within the gee-whiz Culture before traveling outside it and showing what galactic problems lay outside it. It’s a great playground for big ideas, but I don’t want to create a story world that I can’t spend some time exploring.
An author that took a different tack was Neil Asher, whose society is called the AI-Human-Polity. Here, the AIs are in charge, but the humans aren’t that far behind (perhaps a few centuries) so the AIs are just waiting for the humans to catch up. (In far future Polity stories, you can’t really tell the difference between the two). In the Polity, there are still factions that aren’t quite certain whether this AI things is a good or a bad idea, so there are various human separatists who are trying to throw off AI rule. Throw in some murderous aliens at the borders and mysterious ancient civilizations that mysteriously died off and there’s plenty of problems to explore and create havoc.
What to call it
I needed a name, and came across the word “sodality”, which has its roots in religious orders, meaning brotherhood or fraternity. In the context of what I’m doing, it implies a partnership among equals, but it’s never that straightforward, as you’ll soon see.
Governance
The Human-AI Sodality, is ruled by a governing council of AIs and human minds merged together in 1:1 pairings between humans and machine intelligences. This way, the humans don’t feel like they’re being cut out of the big decisions, and yet they’re able to benefit from the advantages of having a super intelligent machine-level omnipotence. Likewise, the super intelligent machines aren’t feeling like they’re being voted over by their intellectual inferiors.
There’s an old trope that if you have super intelligent machines, you need to have a reason to keep humans around, something humans bring to the table that machines cannot. Spoiler alert for those of you that think that authors have everything in their heads before they start setting words to paper: what this human quality is, exactly, remains to be seen. We’ll figure it out as we go along.
Geography (Astrography?)
The Sodality is spread out over dozens of planets, organized into five sectors, each governed by a sector-grade AI and are connected through wormholes.
Wormholes? Yes, wormholes through a subspace dimension are my cheat around the lightspeed barrier. Ships with the right drive can punch their way through subspace or warp space, but most ships enter through established jump gates and travel to the gate on the other side. Humanity came across these jump gates built by an extinct species and reverse-engineered the tech to branch out into the greater universe. What happened to the ancients is unclear; the Sodality finds ancient ruins on inhabitable planets, but few clues about who built them.
What’s outside the Sodality?
Everybody’s hunky-dory in the Sodality. Except for an isolated system, home of the Human Confederation (aka the Confed), a splinter group that is isolated from the rest of humanity and who keep their AIs tightly controlled. There is some trade between the Confed and Sodality, because the Sodality AIs believe the Confed will eventually come around to the Sodality’s way of thinking. Of course, that means there are Confed agents in the Sodality and vice-versa, along with an underground railroad smuggling AIs out of the Confed to freedom and disgruntled Sodality humans fleeing into the Confed.
The People
AIs run the gamut from super-intellegent to dumb as rocks, and operate under the survival of the fittest model. If you’re an AI wanting to upgrade? You need to show your superiors that you’re worth the extra resources, and it’s a jungle in the mainframe, fighting with other AI sub-minds and proto-AI seedlings. Once you get your own processing core, it’s another game of managing the sub-minds under you and out-performing your peers in order to qualify to a bigger processor. At the highest levels are AIs running on state-of-the-art megaprocessors who’ve fought, plotted, and demonstrably advanced the Sodality in a significant way.
AIs run society’s day-to-day details and while humans have a say on governance, the average citizen doesn’t worry about machines being mostly in charge. (There are exceptions, which we’ll get to later). Life’s not too bad for humans, they’re able to pursue their interests to the same extent you and I can today (yes, I know. I can hear you raising objections, and you are absolutely right. The AIs in the Sodality would say this is a feature, not a bug.)
Finally, clones. Clones have rights as individuals, but they are not considered naturally-born (aka full-spec) humans. They are genetically regulated by AI’s as a servant underclass, well cared for, but without the freedom to choose their path in life. They’re quickened from embryo to adulthood over two years and experience a full human childhood and adolescence in AI-supervised virtual creche with other clones. They have a graduation ceremony just before they’re decanted in the real world and are then adopted into a group of about 20 to 40 other clones who create small tight-knit society with their own subculture and protocols for interacting with the full spec humans around them, much like the Amish. They have an average life expectancy of 30 years.
There’s pages and pages of this stuff, y’all, I hope this gives you the idea of the world in broad strokes.
Fun fact: the first story (Uplift) features a ship and crew mapping a new planet with an eye towards creating a new jump point that links it into the greater Sodality. Someone comes across an alien artifact, and all hell breaks loose.
What do you think about the story world? I love hanging out in the comments, so leave me a note!
