The Machines

The Machines

Our future is in space

In 2072 we embarked on humanity's first real voyage to outer space. In a new space race, as a result of rising political tensions caused by global warming, and a strong optimistic political movement of effective accelerationism, termed e/acc, humanity has gone to great lengths to learn how to colonize the rest of the solar system in order to escape its problems on earth. With the help of space elevators and rotating launch towers in earth's orbit, we were now able to send out ships into space with essentially no fuel usage, leaving enough fuel in the ships for them to return, in particular if a nearby planet allows for a turnaround maneuver. My granddad was shot in the direction of Alpha Centauri in one of the first spaceships of this grand mission, marking the beginning of its colonialization. Our destination was so far away, that no single human would survive the whole trip. I myself had been born on the ship, and consequently could expect to spend my whole life here. To allow the survival of our ship and ourselves, food and energy supply containers were being shot towards us from earths space-megastructures at high speeds during the whole trip. Our country wanted to become pioneers in interstellar colonization with the help of these almost self sufficient multi-generation ships. The times on earth were rough, but optimism on earth was high, with all hopes directed towards us, drifting far in outer space. In 2117 however, after only 45 years of constant slow acceleration, our journey would face significant difficulties. It took merely 25 minutes for the ship to be filled with loneliness, and for our home to collapse into nothing but a memory. In this short timespan, the constant stream of multiple simultaneous communication lines came to an end. All radio stations on earth had seized communication with us. It had happened fast, and whatever the incident was, it must have been a global one. 

It would take 47 more years for us to return. The decision to turn around fell as soon as the first life support container failed to be sent by earth. I only know these incidents from stories and logfiles, as I had only just been born at the time. But these logfiles also contained indirect evidence that the data files collected at the time of last transmission had been corrupted. For us, this hinted at an unplanned stop of transmission, rather than a planned one. 

Return

It was now half a century later. With the extraplanetary structures still intact, we were able to decelerate successfully and finally set foot on our home planet again. It appeared cold - free of animals or even smell. Sterile. We ended up on big a big planar area, where the space elevator we had used for landing was mounted. Electronic devices we found in the elevator's lower control center were all fried. There were cars we were able to use to get to a nearby village, but it had nothing left except inanimate, dysfunctional objects. In this age, the dependence on computing electronics for simple devices was immense, and therefore also people's vulnerability to strong hostile electromagnetic pulses. The lack of insects however hinted at something more sinister then mere cyber warfare. We broke into some houses and found a freezer with frozen meat, giving us hope to find life, but also to survive ourselves. In a kitchen we found a well preserved newspaper article from the year 2111. TENSIONS RISING - ALL HOPE IN SPACE

Keep in mind this was 6 years before the last signal was received by our ship. The article read like they were about to prepare for the worst.  Collapse had been predictable from miles ago, but this had been hidden from us the whole time. 

Machines 

After the second night, we spotted tall humanoid robots from approximately 4 miles away though our telescopes. Due to them being the only working intelligent machines we found, we continued to just call them the machines. They seemed to move erratically, aimless, and extremely fast. We estimated the machines to be around 3-3.5 meters in size. These robots were moving, but they seemed dysfunctional as well. They moved awkwardly, looked hard to control due to their high center of gravity, and their behaviour seemed inefficient and out of place. Some moved back and forth on a line. Some fell over and got up again, just to fall over again. One of them started a fight with another one, ending in the former twisting off the head of the latter and then picking up the corpse and moving it to another nearby location. These strange behaviours surely held hints regarding humanity's fate, but we had not yet understood the connection. Why did their CPUs still work? But also, why did they look so out of place, without purpose? What had they been designed for? 

Tunnels

After days of searching we found a door built into the beginning of a mountain, evidentially the entrance to some kind of tunnel. Sporadic bursts of noise came out of the door in irregular intervals, similar to a detuned radio. A 3m x 3m x 3m box made of a type of glass was in front of an entrance of a tunnel, with a woman inside, likely deranged or at least traumatised and horribly scared. She would not leave the box and was barely able to communicate. In the box, there was a notebook with what turned out to be vital, but terrifying information written in it by hand. It had more information on the machines. It was written in the form of a journal, rather than an extensive manual, but it started with a section summarizing a lot of the authors knowledge, with how he obtained it mostly unclear. 

First Notebook

"1) communication. They communicate through audio signals. I don't know why, but instead of electromagnetic waves, they seem to use busts of  what sounds to a human listener like loud, 1-2 seconds long pattern-less drones of noise. I suspect this allows for maximum information density and also serves as a encryption. For sending such audio signals, they open their mouth wide, evidentially focussing the acoustic waves like with a megaphone. "

This explained the noise from behind the metal door. It is the machines talking to each other. It is hard to imagine such an alien language to even exist, and it especially out of place in these otherwise quite humanoid looking robots. 

"All tunnels have railways with occasional motorized wagons travelling along it. The railway system also helps them communicate around the tunnel system's corners, conducting sound fast and far. For this, they press their face against one of the iron rails, such that the speaker directly transmits the sound to it, allowing it to travel along the rails. 

2) Locomotion. They move fast on the planes, but even faster in the tunnle system. The rail system again helps them out here, they can attach themselves to the metal and move along it using many small wheels for acceleration and guiding. For this, they stand above the rails, knee down and transform to a more compact shape with low center of gravity. Each arm and each leg extends a total of 24 wheels, 8 on top and 8 on each side of the respective iron rail. This allows them to maneuver extremely fast, with no need for breaking in corners. 

3) Intelligence. 

I was not able to reliable analyse the intelligence of the machines. I was looking for patterns in their behaviour, but it mostly seems totally chaotic. Outside the tunnel system they seem to break down completely into mania, further suggesting that they were designed specifically for the tunnels. But even inside the tunnels, they are unpredictable and chaotic. 

4) Senses. 

They use hearing for communication, and they can see. However, they cannot see through the glass here. The glass filters out infrared light, suggesting their range of vision to lie in the infrared range. Parallel to the tunnels there are glass pathways, originally designed for maintenance, you can safely walk along. These are what I have mainly used to study them. They do also mostly block sound, at least I have not had issues with them hearing me so far. 

5) Tunnels.

The main question regarding this location is obviously: What is the purpose of the tunnel system and the corresponding machines in the first place? All computers originally likely used for documentation have been destroyed. I have been able to repair some mobile EMP weapons and plan to go deeper in the tunnels soon, taking two of them with me as a defence in case I have to leave the glass protected pathway. "

A naive Attempt

The machines disturbed me deeply. They were so different from what we knew from the technology of earth at the time of last contact, and it seemed impossible to understand their behaviour. The author of the notebook must not have returned from his attempt, but it was also somewhat naive of him to go in there alone. 3 of us took the remaining 3 EMP weapons and our projectile weapons and headed into the tunnle system through the protective glass pathway. Not only to potentially rescue the author of the notebook we found, but mostly for at least tiny shards information, without which we surely could not live on in this world. The tunnels were ventilated well with clean, oxygen rich air, so we did not actually have to rely on out space suits for oxygen. Half an hour into the tunnel, that turned out to be a confusing maze, we saw a glass door marking the end of the protected zone. 25 meters behind, another glass door marked the reentrance into the glass path way. We decide to make the run, and at sight of a machine use the EMP to kill it off, afterwards analyzing the corpse to obtain more information on its inner working. Two of us make the run first, successfully. We agreed to let one of us do the sprint while the others are ready to activate their EMP as soon as they hear any sound of approaching machines. They were fast, but the EMP would instantly and reliably immobilize all electronic devices within range. For a short instant, a subconscious thoughts surfaced uncontrolled in my mind. EMPs probably had killed all electronic devices, except these machines... And.. the freezer with edible meat in it? How long does meat stay good in a freezer? But my surroundings pulled me back to reality. The third of us began his sprint, and immediately as he set off, we heard 2 bursts of noise followed by metallic droning sounds, prompting us to trigger the EMPs. They were ineffective. Of course they were. Otherwise, how could the machines still be here? Now this all happened within an unnaturally short period of time. Two machines came around the corner grinding along the metal rails. Both detached from the rail and looked at each other. The angles seemed off. They both produced a 0.5 second noise drone, but their faces didn't aim directly at each other, but were both slightly directionally offset. Considering how imperfect their whole behaviour is, it seemed unlikely that they possess an algorithm to reliably encode information into sound like that. It made me wonder whether their communication is just as deranged as their behavior. One of them took our team member. As far as we knew, he was still alive. We did not grieve for long before we continued. Merely 40 meters further we found a machine corpse. We started analysing it and immediately saw the reason for the failure of our EMPs and probably also the reason for why these things still existed in the first place, while all other complex devices had broken down during whatever incident it was that had occurred 47 years ago. In the corpses we found diesel engines. After decades of technological advancements, the enemy we face now is running on diesel. We could find no CPU either. These machines were no electronic robots, they were mechanical. Their brains consisted of a complicated mess of movable parts including miniature magnets and gears, their engines were driven with steam. But why diesel? What were the magnets about? I immediately remembered their open field-induced mania, and I felt that the movable parts must present some kind of freakish method for the robots production of motor control. My remaining group member remembers a line of research that used a system of magnets as a reservoir for dynamical computing. This kind of reservoir would however be extremely sensitive to the inputs it gets, which, in the case of robotics, would be the environment it is in. So you would expect such a system to easily fall in states of psychosis, if it is not tuned to the environment. It seems like the creators went to great lengths in order to avoid using electronics, wanted to make the machines immune to cyber attacks, and the engines reliable and long-lived. But why would they be malignant towards humans even in their natural tunnel environment? What were the machines for in the first place? A last piece of information had still been missing for us to fully grasp this situation. 

Second notebook

A notebook we found later finally read: 

"EMP was inefficient. Still escaped and returned to safety. Further down the tunnels, a group of 12 humans is trapped and being moved around from one room to another by the machines. They look scared, but also perversely happy. The machines feed them, but apparently they feed them badly. The food comes out of big metal pipes continuously. I observed them for a while. There is no dinner or lunch times, but rather the pipes just press out a mass of food in an unchanging, slow tempo. The black gelatinous mass is spilled into trenches, from where it can then be consumed. The inhabitants all look fat, but still sick, like from malnourishment. Faeces are all over the floor, just barely separated from the trenches filled with food. The doors carry high electric charge, borderline lethal for humans. All individuals in the group are extremely scared of touching anything. I wanted to help them escape, but their fear of the electricity and of the machines messed up their will to escape. They just show an empty smile and kept eating, squatting down, using their hands like spoons to scoop up their dinner. So I had to leave them behind, not to end up with a collapsed psyche like them. "

 It dawned on me what the original purpose of this absurde system was, and I then knew I would not go further down the tunnels than this. Further down, the notebook stated: 

"I found and analyzed the beginning of the processing pipeline I had been trying to find weeks earlier, before I got interested in the tunnels. Several additional insights lead me to understand this. The humans here are being taught not to escape with electro shocks. They are being fed food for large livestock, including growth accelerators, unsuited for humans. They are... being confused. The machines are farmers. They have been designed for larger animals, now confusing humans with livestock due to their own overly primitive minds. This whole system and the human beings in it have fallen victim to a misunderstanding. The machines' minds had been programmed in strange, esotheric algorithms. They were barely able to work properly in normal conditions, but this was the solution the creators found for automatic food production that can survive cyber warfare. And it worked. Decades after the incident destroyed the majority of technology and life on this planet, the wheels are turning in the tunnel meat-farm, smelling like diesel and faeces, producing raw meat in equally sized portions. If you think about it, it really is an impressive and highly reliable piece of engineering. Reliable for decades until one crucial mistake in the visual recognition of a human being started a chain reaction. No more cows live there now, and no pigs. But humans have tragically infected the place, and started to proliferate in the environment for an unknown reason, breeding faster than the animals already present. " 

Here we are now, we are alone and we are hungry. The machines seem to be able to produce food from this planet, where apparently no life is present outside. But we do not know their method, and therefore cannot do so ourselves. On the other hand, there is the meat that comes out of the other end of the production line. However, I do not know If i can live with eating human meat, and even if I wanted to, the atmosphere here is not breathable directly so we can not forever stay outside where the meat is packed into those freezers in the villages. We have a limited oxygen supply left from within the ship. The other remaining option for food is fed to humans in these tunnels of madness. I vomit as i realize what that means. But the notebook described them as happy, right?