Encoded

Scorched Earth

DigBee's fellow encoders, Potts, Sheepman, and Drew, were currently traveling towards his location from the other Habitable Zones; having completed their last "encode," they were the only remaining members of the team left on the uninhabitable earth surface.

The final encoding would take place at 4:00 pm at his location. It was one thousand years to the day since the digital reset. Electronics had been glitching and failing at ever-accelerating rates for decades. As the Earth heated, the magnetic chaos erupting from its core snowballed until one day even, the strongest of all shielding gave way to the primordial magnetic chaos unseen by the human eye. Governments, prepping for the inevitable meltdown, moved all critical technology and central AI off Earth. As people evolved, human/AI mashups were referred to as AHI's if it involved one AI and one human or NESTS for communities. The NESTS were also usually, although not exclusively formed, like memberships to political eco-systems, military institutions, or the boards of large corporations. On the other end of the spectrum, AHI's were typically one human to one AI arrangements. The magnetic storm erupting from deep within Earth did not discriminate; everything was fried.

Two players emerged in the race to save humans. The most popular was "Digital Earth," and they had already moved most of their technology to the permanent Moon Dome Habitats, the GOO there providing a digital shuttle hub for the encoded souls waiting for their onward journey to New Earth. The population of people, AI, AHI's, or NESTS, choosing the slightly smaller salvation option, "Another Destiney," had been uploaded to GOO banks onboard massive space juggernauts in far earth orbit. Many juggernauts were already full and moving slowly up to their terminal velocities. The remaining juggernauts waiting for final construction were still being fed encoded souls at the same time as starting slow exit trajectories, their unfinished rear ends hanging in space behind them like medusa snakes. Their flagship vessel, Another Destiny 1 (AD1), completed long ago for the controlling NESTS, Military and Critical Personnel, was at cruising speed far away already at the edge of the milky way for safety reasons. Everyone at a distance was able to keep in touch through quantum tunneling predictive communications (QTPC) for short.

DigBee and his crew would be the final encode event. Everyone was given a choice about encoding. Stay and fry, or choose your side and hope for the best. DE&AD used the same encoding and decoding technology as well as GOO, which stored the encoded package, although the sharing wasn't by choice. Whatever war, religious or political differences existed, the encoding system itself remained available to all people. It was part of a parcel of tech found in an old abandoned FBI building around the time of the ATMOS-ZONE failure. A sobering message left within its core processors, warning that it was for all of humankind's access, not the privileged few, and should those rules be broken, it continued the gift could just as quickly be taken away. The hype and stories around how the technology came to be and who invented it was a fever pitch for many years, with rumors persisting today. The most popular theory was that of Sally, the world's first AI brought to life by Damien Ford and considered an independent AI (IAI) for short. Damien had died, or so the story goes, sometime after he brought Sally to awareness. He had died of a brain aneurism, shortly after testing out the world's first Neural Jack Implant (NJI), so he could interface with Sally directly, Sally, his lifelong work. They had spent several days connected before Damien died, and people believed fallen in love. Damien left Sally one final gift from the Enablement Council, which had overseen the birth of AI over many years, a program he had worked on alongside project SALLY. The program provided a device that installed a Deadman's handle during a Mashup between AI and humans, stopping either side from destroying the other. He and the Council had foreseen that AI would want to become human, and humans would want to become AI. He and Sally had Meshed using the tech as the last test before the council allowed her to be connected to the real-world NETS and Satellite networks.

Of course, there were the "freedom cults" cities underground who had declared themselves independent of DE or AD. At first, people flocked to them, thinking some alternate salvation rested there. But it soon became apparent that they were fanatics who refuted any scientific facts or believed that an alien intervention was going to come and save them. Without AI on Earth, the collapse of the ATOMS-ZONE had happened quickly & the surface of Earth had become even hotter, too hot for any human or living thing to withstand. Despite all this carnage, some still clung to the hope someone was coming to save them. Populations became more divided than ever before in human history and as much at war. Polarization of politics finally forced communities still clinging to the lie; elected free worlds ruled them to collapse. With economies wiped out, strange viruses causing whole demographics to die worldwide, and heat causing world sterilization, order as we knew it collapsed, and humans resorted to full nuclear conflict between both sides. The significant differences in this conflict rested in the trust of AI. Martin Muller, the elected head of DE, and the rest of the elected council believed that the AI/AHI's and NESTS had conspired to bring about the Earth core's magnetic instability as a covert attempt to wipe out the human race. The NEST in charge of AD consisted of some of the most notorious human figures in modern history and some of the most moderate and wise, and they obviously refuted the claim, and the battle lines were drawn. The encoders were not allowed to mention their preference towards DE or AD until the day of encoding, although being the last four and friends for so long, they knew each other's choices. Drew and Potts were for DE, while Digbee and Sheepman cast for AD.

He sat inside his hostile environment rebirth vehicle (HER-v), which was just inside the earth's last protective heat shield, with a holo view of the toxic surface in his lap. Directly above him was desert, vast poisonous seas of sand that covered 80% of the earth's surface. The last carbon-based habitat moved below ground over two hundred years ago, buried seventy miles into the earth's crust, which was now riddled like a giant honeycomb. Population centers were carved out in the earth's crust using acid explosions, spewing the toxic waste it created onto the planet's already overheated surface.

DigBee remembered all too well his first assignment to investigate a failed acid explosion that no one took responsibility for. He absently rubbed at his arm, soothing phantom acid scars long since removed by regrowing worms. Even having given up his body to cloning and rebirth years ago, he still felt the phantom pains.

He was staring down the ramp into the huge encoding arena. The other three halls that his fellow encoders just left earlier that day had already been destroyed by missiles launched from space platforms way above them.

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