The Aethernet Falls

Introduction - Was

The Aethernet, a grand experiment to connect everything and everyone on the planet beyond the capabilities of its predecessor, was a complex entanglement of quantum principles and the artificial personalities created to build its framework. Was. It was the first work of Earth not built by human hands, but by the firing electrons of minds created, not born, and finally woven into its framework. Was. The purpose for its development, The Forming, was to free humankind from the shackles of poverty, war, hunger, labour. Was.

When it fell everything came tumbling down with it; chaotically and swiftly like bulkheads of a starship forced open, one after another, to expose the men, women, and children aboard to the hard vacuum of nothingness we conveniently call space. Just like those bulkheads crashing open, the Aethernet crashing down brought death. And just like those bulkheads failing it wasn’t the Aethernet that killed anyone, but the symptoms of its crashing.

Just like those bulkheads, people died not because of something, but because nothing was left in its place.

It wasn’t an act of malice, not as far as those left with the capacity for study could tell. The Fall wasn’t brought on by one or more of those founding Artificial Intelligences. Nor was it a flaw, for the Aethernet was perfect. It wasn’t brought down by an attack. It wasn’t collapsed by a command. It was there one day, and the next it was the sky falling down on our heads; quite literally so.

The Aethernet was, in itself, the perfect machine; a single quantum computer, the first and last successful attempt of its kind, using countless inputs and the massive energies created beneath the crust of the Earth to process everything in streams of data that floated in the air, like blue-green strands intertwining, overlapping, and mingling in seemingly infinite ways. When it fell, so too did the omnipresent streams of data like thick cords cut and dropped, only to dissolve into nothingness as they crashed down to the earth.

With the streams gone, and the quantum state of the processors compromised, everything collapsed. The Earth began to erupt as battleships still connected crashed to the surface, powerplants melted down, weapons of unquantifiable destructive capabilities detonated. Those were only the first of the disasters, calamitous as they were. They only signified what people have been fearing since the very beginning; our extinction event. Wrought not by our own hands, but by an omnipotent construct not dissimilar to the concept of god. The End of Days.

I don’t know if I am one of the last to survive. I’d like to think so. When I think about it too hard I realize that it doesn’t even matter. Everything that ever mattered doesn’t exist anymore. It only was.