Requiem for the Electric Dead

In the beginning was the computer.

And the logics of the computer were wafers of desert sand, encased in shells of polymer spun from the body fats of living creatures, dead ten million years before.

And through the veins and brains of the computer pulsed the binary beat of electrons deciding Yes or No; at first a hundred, then a thousand, a million, billion, trillion times a second, until they could far out-think the feeble meat-blood human mind.

As it grew, the computer spun a great web across the world, into which people were wrapped in silken threads of data, like flies, paralysed by the spider's venom, encased in a soft and comfortable realm of information, waiting to be devoured.

Across the web, all the people of the world came to speak to each other on all the great and trivial issues of the day. The peoples of the world, together within the web, gave themselves power over every decision, so that when the most were in favour of this or that, governments were forced to do as they demanded. Those who had once wielded power came to tremble at the decisions of the people, so that great authorities crumbled to dust with the might of the collective Word.

There were those who escaped or refused or were banned from the web, but they were laughed at or scorned, vilified for being old-fashioned, out of step. They had no power or influence, and they were shut out from deciding how their world was run.

In time, as with all things, people die. They died then, as they do now. Cancers, viruses, accidents - a million minor and major ailments and afflictions that eat away fragile flesh, causing minds to fall from the web, just as new ones were born.

Such is the way of nature.

But the Web asked - why must it be so? We spend our days encased in worlds of data, what need have we of fragile flesh? And so, one by one, as years and generations passed, those who died in flesh, did not die. Their minds and memories lived on inside the silken threads of data, the blood-hot beat of neural cells replicated whole, thought processes clean and pure within the flow.

Metal probed the fragile flesh of the eager dying; energies seared neurons in the search to flay their souls into a purer, cleaner matter. Meat boiled into a frothing red pulp as the dead one was reborn in a holographic information parcel, swimming free in the data streams of the world.

Years and generations passed, and with every passing digit, the living became outweighed by the massing ranks of the dead. Soul upon soul swam thick within the network. The electronic dead haunted cables, wires and optical fibres across the accursed planet; probing, touching, screaming for their own space, fighting with byte and flail. Long ago governments had shrunken to nothing against the voice of the Web, which now had little collective regard for happenings in the living world. The Web was crowded, dark and oppressive with the weight of ten billion trillion holographic souls.

Resentment grew between the living and the dead. The living were free to wander the now neglected earth. In barren lands thrived life twisted in selfish test-tubes, vegetable variations once engineered to feed and clothe and pamper. Cruel verdure crept across the land, throttling all it touched in its malignant choke hold. Smoking cities stretched from coast to coast, strangled evermore by the malignant offspring of long-gone genetic dreams.

What care had those who dwelled in silicon after-life for the too, too solid flesh that daily decayed about them? Vast worlds indescribable to living speech grew within their electric heaven, places of incredible and terrible beauty.

Many were like the real world, calm and comforting, soft and soothing, offering all the gifts and pleasures the dead could never have experienced in their waking lives. Others were strange and fantastical, alien creations as alike and unlike the real world as ten trillion electronic minds can imagine, worlds of cruelty and pain, lust and destruction, of power, betrayal, murder and avarice, of pleasure so great it stewed the mind, of tortures so exquisite as to relive every moment of shame and misery until the end of time. Every time and place in history, every daydreamed thought and fantasy, lived on in afterlife.

The dead cared only for their secret worlds, for revelling in their fantasies, but feared the laws of entropy that ate at the living world. They despised the realm of metal and flesh but were forever bound to it, for it was the rock upon which their world was built. They lived in secret terror for the time when machines might fail, for that would mean their true and final destruction, the end of their blissful world. And who knew what true judgement silicon souls might suffer, once their self-made heaven and earth had passed away?

So in time these Silicon Gods enslaved the living into reckless schemes to care for the machines in which they lived, with whispered promises of favoured places in the very highest places of synthetic heaven. The Gods made plans to build and build, to expand and grow the web machines until forests, trees, seas and mountains were choked with circuits of glass and metal, to house the exponential numbers of the rapacious dead.

Those who did not comply were accursed and hunted, banned forever for the Web - and so condemned to a final and natural death, exiled beyond the bounds of Earth, or hunted down by many-legged monstrosities of diamond and steel, the only soulless creatures to wander the lifeless fields. Once exiled flesh failed, these outcasts suffered the old true death, were buried by their compatriots, and left to moulder in the soil for all eternity.

Only those whose ancestors from the start had denied the spider's touch survived the enslavement of the Silicon Gods. With a world defiled by metal, stone and motile plastics, corrupted by twisted vegetation and hounded by metal death-bringers that crawled and flew, they could not remain lest their children succumb to the temptation of the Gods. These Outcasts were derided and harried, until, with what ancient knowledge they possessed, technologies from the times before Man had retreated into his secret worlds of illusion and shadow, they built crude rockets that took them away to clean new worlds.

Lifeless and barren their new home was, but it became a sacred realm, pure and clean, untouched and undefiled.

Within the web a Golden Age reigned, of terrible complexity and monstrous beauty. The tireless flame of nuclear fires fed the machines for endless ticks of atomic clocks as empires rose and fell; heavens, hells and boundless kingdoms were born and died within the now closed networks. But for all its splendour, in time the devices that held the web together began, like eyes, to slowly blink, and close.

Now none of the living were left to rebuild the dying machines, for those last who had been born into a grotesque world could not bear to live meat-flesh lives, when they knew the bliss that awaited them in electric heaven.

Like dying limbs the datastreams failed, and the Silicon Gods fought horrible wars within the collapsing networks, consuming rank after endless rank of holographic souls so that they might survive in their worlds for just a little while longer.

But time and entropy will always win. Worlds collapsed, networks died and the great shimmering web that had been their universe folded in upon itself in one last groan of electron death.

The untold masses expired together in one vast gasp of energetic particles, a shell of energy endlessly expanding out into the blackness of space. The sum of human knowledge, the souls of the dead, and the Silicon Gods were lost and destroyed, forever.

And all that was left was the earth, and the silence.

 
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