Vanilla Dusk ✓

Dusk Part 2

The camp bed creaks as Elli shifts uncomfortably, lying flat on the rock hard mattress. One of his legs snakes around the crumpled blanket. The night is longer than usual, with the bed next to his vacant. Shaan is still in the medical tent and without his soft snores which often serve as Elli's lullaby, his insomnia relapses. He has been tossing, turning, sprawling, curling and trying many different positions for the past two hours and his eyes are still wide open. When he can't sleep, Shaan usually chats with him and feeds him intriguing tales from the past. He is a few years older than Elli and spent a considerably longer time at school. He has told Elli about The Fall of A.I. and The Grave Apocalypse that took over the globe three centuries ago. Elli remembers marvelling at all the spellbinding historical details Shaan was able to recite.

'Three hundred years ago or so, there was this thing called artificial intelligence,' Shaan once told Elli. 'Our ancestors were intelligent enough to fabricate machines capable of possessing abilities equivalent to humans' and they named them "androids". They resembled us in many ways. They were made to look like us, to communicate, to move around and to accomplish tasks just like us. They could take on jobs abandoned by us, serve us in the households and assist us in further developing our world.'

'That sounds amazing,' Elli has exclaimed, his eyes sparkling. He has never learnt enough from his History lessons to know what happened after men succeeded in making allegedly one of the most phenomenal and advanced inventions.

'But that state of bliss didn't last long. Greedy and ambitious were our ancestors – they weren't satisfied with just the first batch of androids. They endeavoured to improve, amend and redesign their androids, eventually experimenting with machines that did not only possess human intelligence, but also human emotions and feelings. They started cloning and these androids, created to possess sentiments and memories, began to roam the streets. Blessed with superb intellectual abilities, strength and immortality, these androids were able to think and feel. No longer content with being the lowest in the hierarchy, they decided to mount protests. All at once, the machines our ancestors created to make our lives improve became our greatest enemies. They turned against their own creators and attempted to replace them. A war broke out. Androids went out of control and began defying their masters' orders, manipulating, harassing and slaughtering humans everywhere. Our ancestors spent years annihilating these machines and when the war was finally over, so many lives had been claimed. Since then, androids have been banned and artificial intelligence is to be handled with absolute caution. Our ancestors learnt from this fatal experience that gifting machines with capabilities equal to or greater than ours is a perilous decision. The incessant desire for advancement might end with dire consequences.'

'However, it is our distinctive nature to persist and never stop craving for the impossible. With our world plagued by aging populations, food shortage and severe climate change resulting in an explosion of infectious diseases at that time, our ancestors soon embarked on another journey of experiments and they gambled on another invention this time – a drug that could make immortality and enhanced immune systems possible. In the midst of inventing this drug, they accidentally created a lethal virus that leaked out and spread to different parts of the world. The virus turned half of the population into mindless, bloodthirsty monsters with inhuman strength and they started preying on the healthy humans. They bit one another and spread the virus, ultimately leading humanity to the brink of extinction. This, in our history, was marked as The Grave Apocalypse. The surviving humans spent decades battling with these monsters and when all the monsters eventually died of starvation, only one third of our human population had remained.'

'After the apocalypse, our ancestors rebuilt the world from ruins and reverted to rudimentary lifestyles. Population only began to grow in the last century and some technology managed to return. All was peaceful until The Great Catastrophe struck a hundred years ago, when the aggravation of climate change finally decimated nearly half of the Earth. Suddenly, the ground quaked and cracked everywhere; gigantic waves crushed to different shores; lava was spilling and bursting from every volcano; all the villages and rainforests were wiped out by tornadoes; radiation was leaking from several power plants, contaminating different rivers and farms; and on and off, some places either got frozen or burnt to tatters.'