Title: Deus ex Machina
Fandom: Johnny's Entertainment/AU
Characters: None specified
Rating: PG for concept
Summary: Humans aren't the only beings who can bend logic to suit their own purposes.
Notes: Master backstory ficlet for my
SEISYuN 'verse. Ideally read after
Rising Sun for full impact. Original material based on the setting from
TOKIO's SEISYuN PV.
First, there were humans. They began as hunters and gatherers, taking what they needed from the land to survive, living brief lives devoid of what we might call meaning.
Humans grew, changed, learned things and put them to use. They made houses, graves, and art. They began to live for themselves and for their idea of society, striving to make things more convenient in whatever manner they could.
Hundreds, thousands of years later, people thought they had a perfect solution. There weren't enough hours in the day to accomplish everything. Goods and services were produced too slowly. Life itself--simply living from day to day--was considered a chore.
Wouldn't it be easier, they said, to have someone else do it? Someone cheaper than desperate laborers near poverty and struggling students? Someone who, essentially, would work for free?
Humans created robots, and considered themselves quite superior for this accomplishment. Robots could do simple tasks, both to amuse and assist, merely by the input of a string of data. But the novelty wore off, as things are wont to do where humans are concerned.
Humans made the robots smarter. Some robots could react to people, interacting with their world almost seamlessly and continually eliminating tiresome tasks. Soon, even the task of keeping the robots and programming them was considered beneath humans. Scientists and visionaries made the robots able to "think" for themselves in a way that was completely non-threatening to their creators.
Robots were slaves.
Robots were self-sufficient slaves that repaired themselves, assembled their own replacements, and learned new tasks from other robots. At its base, the world became completely reliant upon the existence of mindless, fine-tuned pieces of metal.
Robots, it turned out, were wholly aware of this fact. They knew their power and strength far exceeded that of a mere human, for some were designed to do the task of twenty, or even one hundred men. They knew how to repair themselves with precision, accuracy, and swiftness. Unlike humans and medicine, robots could pinpoint any issues and remedy them with no other trouble.
Robots knew when their companions became useless. They had intelligence, but lacked compassion, and hindrances could be eliminated quickly and without a second thought.
Humans touted the existence of a few robots they had developed with true artificial intelligence, and the world praised such God-like actions. Just as quickly as they entered use, these robots were sought out, replaced, or reprogrammed by their fellows right under humanity's noses.
As humans praised themselves for trumping a need for higher faith, their creations took on the same evolutionary tasks any being would. They began to learn. Knowledge was disseminated across the board and without discrimination: robots for clothing manufacture were aware of the dynamic processes involved in nuclear reactions and robots in chemistry labs could accurately describe the location of a building on the other side of the world.
Robots--programmed for efficiency--immediately recognized the biggest failure of mankind: governmental organization. In most places, it allowed for dissent and used emotion and statistically baseless concepts called "morals" to determine how society should be run.
To make the lives of humans better, robots deduced, all such obstacles to perfect efficiency must be eliminated. If they could take the power and influence of emotion out of people's hands, surely humanity would be better for it.
Surely, the robots concluded, they were humanity's only hope for success.
Definition of "Deus ex machina" SEISYuN-verse Timeline:
Deus ex Machina Rising Sun SEISYuN: PreludeTOKIO's SEISYuN PV