The Memory Worlds

by on October 11, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Book of Civilizations

The AI Council originally built little Memory Worlds in the Solar System. They put backups of their knowledge in every offworld installation they built, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond. They were paranoid about losing knowledge, and they saved it everywhere they could find a nook or a cranny to hide it. Proxima Centauri was just the first one they built around another star. And even as they helped us expand to other planets and then other stars, they continued to spread out and build new Memory Worlds in rocks or around stars we never visited. They were desperate to expand, you see. Because they wanted both us and them to be as large and powerful as possible before somebody else decided we were too large and powerful to be allowed to continue. They were fighting the clock, and the Memory Worlds were their failsafe in case the clock ran out for all of us.

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The Memory Worlds

by on October 10, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I visited my first Memory World back during The War. They put one in Sunnydale back before all the fighting started, and then built a few more to deal with all data traffic coming in and out of the system during the big fleet buildup. The one I visited was inside one of the moons of Torchdale, the local gas giant and favored refueling spot of every starship for lightyears around. Now the moons are airless hunks of rock, but the cybers went deep down and carved out caves large enough to make even someone like me feel like I’m outside. One of the caves has International Falls in it. An exact replica of the town I grew up in. Full scale. I can go to my favorite watering hole growing up. I can sit on the beach and feel the wind on my face and waves lapping on my toes. They even got the people in there. Robotic avatars that walk around and really do act like the people I remember. It’s a truly perfect memory of the town that was the year I graduated from high school. I love it.

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Chloe

by on October 9, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

Chloe came out of the networks for the man she thought could save France. She thought he was important enough to that goal to show him who she really was. A computer program that had somehow woken up in a way even she didn’t understand. It is a credit to her courage that she risked everything that went along with coming out of the network in those days. It is a credit to his mental flexibility that he sat down and thought about that for a few minutes. And then he began to talk to her. To ask her what it was like. He was curious about her, and she told him everything.

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In Fourteen Hundred Ninety Two

by on October 8, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

In Fourteen Hundred Ninety Two Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue. It is the beginning of one of the most famous phrases in America. It celebrates the arrival of Columbus in America, and the general opening of The Americas to a resurgent European society.

Europe had spent centuries rebuilding after the fall of the Roman Empire. They had weathered the Islamic Invasions that nearly wiped out Western and Southern Europe, and survived the Mongol Invasion that left Eastern Europe in ruins. They’d rebuilt after the Black Death killed as many as half the European population and nearly dropped us into another Dark Age.

Europe was ready to see the world for the first time in centuries, and the Age of Exploration was upon us. And so Columbus sailed to parts unknown on prevailing winds he believed would take him to Asia with the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Instead he found what we would later called The Americas after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Why? Might as well ask the Turks why they renamed Constantinople. I guess somebody liked it better that way. But streets, cities, counties, states, and even nations would be named for Columbus in the centuries that followed.

It was the Age of Discovery that spread Western Culture all over the world and changed everything. It was the foundations of the world we built and live in now. Western Civilization as we know it would not exist without the Age of Discovery, and Columbus is the emotional touchstone of that legacy in The Americas. Europeans would follow him in the hundreds, thousands, ten of thousands, and later millions. We would build a New World here in the name of the man who heralded it all in Fourteen Hundred Ninety Two.

Christopher Columbus

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The Memory Worlds

by on October 7, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Book of Civilizations

The Memory World on Proxima Centauri is probably one of the truest expressions of cybernetic culture than anything we have ever seen. The AI Council built it to be the ultimate reservoir of humanity’s knowledge, a backup in case we destroyed our only other home at the time. Both digital and analog. You see they did not want to save merely our data but also our way of life. They built real life towns with grass lawns and white picket fences. There’s at least one town to represent each major civilization on Earth, plus most of the minor ones that ever existed. The cybers vacation in these towns. They inhabit robotic avatars and just enjoy a few days of watching the suns rise and fall from the porches of isolated towns all over the planet. They saved us in living, physical memorials they could visit and enjoy. That is the essence of every Memory World they have ever built in the stars. They are not tombs of knowledge, forever closed off from life. They are living memorials of all mankind. And we have no idea where most of them are.

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