Post by Archangel on Mar 28, 2012 18:19:38 GMT -5
ARCHANGEL CITY: A History
The scholars of the Unicademy in Architect, the Musaeon in Ix, and the Library of Archangelia hold unanimous in their belief that we, our civilisation, is the first to develop in the history of the world. That our few thousand years of building and fighting and dying is the only time amongst billions of years sentient creatures ever ruled this world. They must not know the truth. In hiding the truth, I hide the very idea that led us to our previous destruction.
The very seductive idea....
The end of the world's first casualty was its causality. Before the nuclear winter, before our great buildings crumbled, before our skies darkened, before the animals died, and before the fall of the last tree.... It was us. We died. Specifically, our humanity. We lost our humanity in the most blatant, primal, obvious sense that no one even noticed. Oh, so severe was our loss...
We call our world "Earth". Scholars- Ancient scholars, ones from my time, postulated that before the world's landmasses shifted to form one continent, there were actually many continents, with many different peoples and cultures and nations. We finally reached the state in our collective intelligence where we wondered if maybe we weren't alone, not just in the universe but in our history. The world is many billion years old, 3/4ths of it's estimated lifespan... So maybe in this time other creatures had developed intelligence, but time erased them and their evidence from our world... Scientists were working on proving that another race of beings had developed intelligence when the world was about half of it's life old, when there were not one but seven continents, when it happened...
The company was called Primech and they had discovered immortality. And that is when we lost our humanity.
The notion had been toyed with for many years by science fiction writers. Using artificial means to keep us alive, at the cost of shedding our organic forms. The plan was to upload the minds of every man, woman, and child into a vast network of computers, where we could virtually create and dwell in any kind of environment, and never perish. The people rejoiced. Our leaders passed legislation to make the Transcendence happen within the year. Here was an end to war, poverty, and death
Construction immediately began on the vast Ecumenopolis, that is, World City. To contain the circuitry and processors that would be needed to house the minds of the entire world, they needed to build on the entire world. And so a city was constructed that covered the entire continent of the world. Everything in its way was obliterated. What would computers need plants and animals for? When the final sector of the city was completed, people rejoiced.
My parents...they were scholars. They were among the very few that resisted this mass extinction. For that was what happened to life on the world when humans destroyed the plans and animals and then their bodies. My parents fled with several other survivors and attempted to live off what was left of the oceanic life. Meanwhile, the Ecumenopolis hummed.
Flowing through the massive cable highways that crossed the City were electricity and information...and the minds of our entire race.
My mother died when I was 3. We had been living on the coast for 2 years and food was so scarce that we were barely alive. We had been hearing rumours that somewhere there was a massive stockpile of all the leftover food and resources that had been discarded from the Transcendence, but my father refused to believe it. He died when I was 6. There were only two of us left then. The last time we had heard a rumour of the Stockpile was the last time we had seen another person alive- two years past. Mary decided there was no other hope, so she took me and we set off north.
Mary died when I was 10. For some reason it was always overcast-that I remember. I continued on alone, and was hours from death when i found the Stockpile.
Turns out, it was a massive landfill that barely resembled a stockpile as a disgusting ocean dump. We had dumped everything into the ocean in our rapid and rabid clearing of the land. Luckily, living off the few creatures left in the ocean all my life had taught me to swim. The first thing i found was a tin of beans. Nothing had ever tasted so good as that meal, the meal that saved my life.
I never saw another survivor, but always maintained hope that there were other oceanic dump sites across the world, and that people like me had found them and used their meager supplies to survive. And survive i did. To keep myself sane i read and memorized the complete works of the Encyclopedia of Canadannica, which my parents had managed to save on a solar powered tablet. The one thing they were fiercely adamant about was that i were never to lose this information, but to ensure its survival. With the deterioration of the world, i figured i might as well copy all this info into my mind.
I was 22. That year the rain stopped and the world ended.
I don't know what caused the crash- if it was something someone had programmed before the Transcendence, or maybe some internal error, or maybe the people's minds just couldn't handle it anymore... Who knows, maybe someone even figured out how to hack the system with their mind... It started when the Ecumenacortex released Update 2.3 to the system.
The central computer, the Ecumenacortex, it erupted into an explosion so large it shook the entire continent. Im not sure how long the minds of the people inside lasted, if they felt any pain or even noticed as section by section, the entire grid was taken offline. Is there even an afterlife for computers? Do they continue to think when the power is off? I like to think the electrical pulses of the minds of the world were released from their machinal prisons and are in a better place...
But a better place was the furthest place from where i was. The raging conflagration of the Ecumenacortex engulfed vast areas, causing the power cores of the dead city to explode, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the lifeless environment. Well, almost lifeless. I was woken up From a dream. A dream about fire. I found my dream surrounding me, burning me, and then a massive flash of white light erased my humanity from the dead world.
The fires didn't destroy the entire world-city. As the years, then the decades, and then the centuries passed, the powerless tombs began to crumble without their mechanical maintenance. The skies were black and a terrible nuclear winter ravaged the world.
But the nuclear winter, as with everything else in the universe, did not last. After several decades it subsided, the radiation levels lowered, and a miracle began to happen.
Life...in the known universe, what is easier to destroy? But then again... What is more difficult to Eradicate?
Eventually all of our great metal and concrete structures crumbled and were reclaimed by the Earth. The same Earth we had so greatly abused, and was now gently nursing its wounds.
I woke up to a woman's voice. And birds singing. As i drifted in and out of consciousness i was vaguely aware of her summoning another to carry me to their home. At one point i wondered if this was heaven before the darkness enveloped me. I woke up to the smell of something delicious, accompanied by a merry sizzling sound. Groaning, i opened my eyes and tried to sit up.
"Whoah there now, take it easy. You've been in and out for days.... Can you understand me? My name is Sarmichael."
"Where...where am I?" My voice was raspy as though I had not spoken in years.
"My wife Antisse found you in the woods, she thought you were dead till she realised you were breathing. We carried you back to our home, which is where you are now."
"Woods....?"
Sarmichael didn't believe my story. He did not beleive that I had never seen a forest because this forest was centuries old.
"So unless you've been sleepin out there for a thousand years..."
It was many years before I discovered I was immortal. I stayed with Sarmichael and Antisse and helped them around their homestead and farm. Antisse would joke over the years that I never aged, Sarmichael would try to avoid looking at me funny because of my looks, but eventually they grew accustomed to my ...physical eccentricity...
Eventually, Sarmichael and Antisse grew Old and I took over all the work around the homestead. I never told them, but i no longer needed to eat or drink...im not sure how but I suspect being caught in the center of the Power Core explosion mutated by very makeup to make me different from these people, yet looking almost the same....
To entertain Sarmichael and Antisse i would tell them many facts about the world around us, facts I had learned from the Encyclopedia on my long gone tablet. Facts about the various trees or animals. (i still do not know how so many various species survived. Perhaps rumours of a plant and animal conservation vault were true...) One day Antisse decided that the homestead was too much a burden for them to maintain, and told me they were giving me the land and moving to the village.
The village was a trading hub built around a 'mysterious structure' that turned out to be a piece of unearthed ancient metal piping. They had turned it into a monument and named their village after an inscription found among the rust.
Archangel Village
The years went by and the townsfolk grew accustomed to the never aging physically deformed son of the long deceased Antisse and Sarmichael. They even looked to me as sort of a leader when it came to decisions about the village, due to my extensive knowledge. And so, unaging, undying, physically Similar yet unlike these people...i decided to remain. Maybe...maybe this time we could do it right. I would live here, and help these people and their descendants to build a wondrous city.
Archangel City.
The survivors of the end of the world had evolved, but i had not. I was frozen in my physical state, so while we still look alike, we share one major physical difference. I have a weight on my back that they do not. I am the last survivor of my race, my species...
Homo Sapiens Archangelecus
The scholars of the Unicademy in Architect, the Musaeon in Ix, and the Library of Archangelia hold unanimous in their belief that we, our civilisation, is the first to develop in the history of the world. That our few thousand years of building and fighting and dying is the only time amongst billions of years sentient creatures ever ruled this world. They must not know the truth. In hiding the truth, I hide the very idea that led us to our previous destruction.
The very seductive idea....
The end of the world's first casualty was its causality. Before the nuclear winter, before our great buildings crumbled, before our skies darkened, before the animals died, and before the fall of the last tree.... It was us. We died. Specifically, our humanity. We lost our humanity in the most blatant, primal, obvious sense that no one even noticed. Oh, so severe was our loss...
We call our world "Earth". Scholars- Ancient scholars, ones from my time, postulated that before the world's landmasses shifted to form one continent, there were actually many continents, with many different peoples and cultures and nations. We finally reached the state in our collective intelligence where we wondered if maybe we weren't alone, not just in the universe but in our history. The world is many billion years old, 3/4ths of it's estimated lifespan... So maybe in this time other creatures had developed intelligence, but time erased them and their evidence from our world... Scientists were working on proving that another race of beings had developed intelligence when the world was about half of it's life old, when there were not one but seven continents, when it happened...
The company was called Primech and they had discovered immortality. And that is when we lost our humanity.
The notion had been toyed with for many years by science fiction writers. Using artificial means to keep us alive, at the cost of shedding our organic forms. The plan was to upload the minds of every man, woman, and child into a vast network of computers, where we could virtually create and dwell in any kind of environment, and never perish. The people rejoiced. Our leaders passed legislation to make the Transcendence happen within the year. Here was an end to war, poverty, and death
Construction immediately began on the vast Ecumenopolis, that is, World City. To contain the circuitry and processors that would be needed to house the minds of the entire world, they needed to build on the entire world. And so a city was constructed that covered the entire continent of the world. Everything in its way was obliterated. What would computers need plants and animals for? When the final sector of the city was completed, people rejoiced.
My parents...they were scholars. They were among the very few that resisted this mass extinction. For that was what happened to life on the world when humans destroyed the plans and animals and then their bodies. My parents fled with several other survivors and attempted to live off what was left of the oceanic life. Meanwhile, the Ecumenopolis hummed.
Flowing through the massive cable highways that crossed the City were electricity and information...and the minds of our entire race.
My mother died when I was 3. We had been living on the coast for 2 years and food was so scarce that we were barely alive. We had been hearing rumours that somewhere there was a massive stockpile of all the leftover food and resources that had been discarded from the Transcendence, but my father refused to believe it. He died when I was 6. There were only two of us left then. The last time we had heard a rumour of the Stockpile was the last time we had seen another person alive- two years past. Mary decided there was no other hope, so she took me and we set off north.
Mary died when I was 10. For some reason it was always overcast-that I remember. I continued on alone, and was hours from death when i found the Stockpile.
Turns out, it was a massive landfill that barely resembled a stockpile as a disgusting ocean dump. We had dumped everything into the ocean in our rapid and rabid clearing of the land. Luckily, living off the few creatures left in the ocean all my life had taught me to swim. The first thing i found was a tin of beans. Nothing had ever tasted so good as that meal, the meal that saved my life.
I never saw another survivor, but always maintained hope that there were other oceanic dump sites across the world, and that people like me had found them and used their meager supplies to survive. And survive i did. To keep myself sane i read and memorized the complete works of the Encyclopedia of Canadannica, which my parents had managed to save on a solar powered tablet. The one thing they were fiercely adamant about was that i were never to lose this information, but to ensure its survival. With the deterioration of the world, i figured i might as well copy all this info into my mind.
I was 22. That year the rain stopped and the world ended.
I don't know what caused the crash- if it was something someone had programmed before the Transcendence, or maybe some internal error, or maybe the people's minds just couldn't handle it anymore... Who knows, maybe someone even figured out how to hack the system with their mind... It started when the Ecumenacortex released Update 2.3 to the system.
The central computer, the Ecumenacortex, it erupted into an explosion so large it shook the entire continent. Im not sure how long the minds of the people inside lasted, if they felt any pain or even noticed as section by section, the entire grid was taken offline. Is there even an afterlife for computers? Do they continue to think when the power is off? I like to think the electrical pulses of the minds of the world were released from their machinal prisons and are in a better place...
But a better place was the furthest place from where i was. The raging conflagration of the Ecumenacortex engulfed vast areas, causing the power cores of the dead city to explode, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the lifeless environment. Well, almost lifeless. I was woken up From a dream. A dream about fire. I found my dream surrounding me, burning me, and then a massive flash of white light erased my humanity from the dead world.
The fires didn't destroy the entire world-city. As the years, then the decades, and then the centuries passed, the powerless tombs began to crumble without their mechanical maintenance. The skies were black and a terrible nuclear winter ravaged the world.
But the nuclear winter, as with everything else in the universe, did not last. After several decades it subsided, the radiation levels lowered, and a miracle began to happen.
Life...in the known universe, what is easier to destroy? But then again... What is more difficult to Eradicate?
Eventually all of our great metal and concrete structures crumbled and were reclaimed by the Earth. The same Earth we had so greatly abused, and was now gently nursing its wounds.
I woke up to a woman's voice. And birds singing. As i drifted in and out of consciousness i was vaguely aware of her summoning another to carry me to their home. At one point i wondered if this was heaven before the darkness enveloped me. I woke up to the smell of something delicious, accompanied by a merry sizzling sound. Groaning, i opened my eyes and tried to sit up.
"Whoah there now, take it easy. You've been in and out for days.... Can you understand me? My name is Sarmichael."
"Where...where am I?" My voice was raspy as though I had not spoken in years.
"My wife Antisse found you in the woods, she thought you were dead till she realised you were breathing. We carried you back to our home, which is where you are now."
"Woods....?"
Sarmichael didn't believe my story. He did not beleive that I had never seen a forest because this forest was centuries old.
"So unless you've been sleepin out there for a thousand years..."
It was many years before I discovered I was immortal. I stayed with Sarmichael and Antisse and helped them around their homestead and farm. Antisse would joke over the years that I never aged, Sarmichael would try to avoid looking at me funny because of my looks, but eventually they grew accustomed to my ...physical eccentricity...
Eventually, Sarmichael and Antisse grew Old and I took over all the work around the homestead. I never told them, but i no longer needed to eat or drink...im not sure how but I suspect being caught in the center of the Power Core explosion mutated by very makeup to make me different from these people, yet looking almost the same....
To entertain Sarmichael and Antisse i would tell them many facts about the world around us, facts I had learned from the Encyclopedia on my long gone tablet. Facts about the various trees or animals. (i still do not know how so many various species survived. Perhaps rumours of a plant and animal conservation vault were true...) One day Antisse decided that the homestead was too much a burden for them to maintain, and told me they were giving me the land and moving to the village.
The village was a trading hub built around a 'mysterious structure' that turned out to be a piece of unearthed ancient metal piping. They had turned it into a monument and named their village after an inscription found among the rust.
Archangel Village
The years went by and the townsfolk grew accustomed to the never aging physically deformed son of the long deceased Antisse and Sarmichael. They even looked to me as sort of a leader when it came to decisions about the village, due to my extensive knowledge. And so, unaging, undying, physically Similar yet unlike these people...i decided to remain. Maybe...maybe this time we could do it right. I would live here, and help these people and their descendants to build a wondrous city.
Archangel City.
The survivors of the end of the world had evolved, but i had not. I was frozen in my physical state, so while we still look alike, we share one major physical difference. I have a weight on my back that they do not. I am the last survivor of my race, my species...
Homo Sapiens Archangelecus