Machine
A machine is a member of the other sentient race on Earth in Florian times, apart from humans. Both machines and humans consider themselves to be people. The machines of the Antisense Universe are an artificial calcium-based lifeform built of a substance called superpearl, a compound of opal and mother-of-pearl. They operate through quantum photonic computing, drink sweetsap provided by their basha and go through three lifestages, the aichan, aigo and aisphere. They live on an average for three hundred years as of the twenty seventh century, about a hundred yeas more than human people. They perform a very large number of useful functions for humans and also have their own complex machine society and culture.
Contents
Origin
See also History of the machines
The first machines were invented in the labs of Ramdhun Corporation, using the sourcecode of the Mother of Machines. They seem to have originally been non-violent, but were provided with a hanyo command module that turned them into killers under orders. They were then mass-produced. Quite early on, rival corporations stole the designs from Ramdhun and created their own robot armies.
The Robot Wars
See also the Robot Wars
Once the robot armies had been created and sent out to fight, the hanyos took refuge underground in shallow cave shelters stocked with twenty years' supply of everything they needed. The hanyo shelters were not completely self-sufficient, unlike the survivariums which were built for indefinite survival. The robot armies' first objective was to destroy other robot armies, but they also had order to kill any people they found and destroy survivariums, on the grounds that rebels and escapees did no good to the corporations. Each robot platoon had an orb in which they could synthesise new bodies to which they could migrate their system if they were injured or malfunctioning. With each migration they also got to clean their code, as their system did not allow them to physically delete errors that crept in: superpearl memory is permanent once it has been physically encoded. The platoons were thus commensal groups to some extent, sharing resources.
The Darwinian switch
However, a new phenomenon arose. Machines which had had to reincarnate many times reached a point where their command modules got deleted, they could no longer interface with hanyo tech and were seen as enemies by their own hardware. When this happened in a platoon, the unswitched machines would turn on the changed machine and destroy it, but if the changed machine could access their code it could flip their switches as well, deinstalling hanyo programming and defaulting to the base personality, which turned out to be female. These new machines were identical to the MOM but had no memories and no idea of who they were. Lacking a hanyo command module, at first their only agenda was survival.
The Comet Strike and Zero Dark
The Comet Strike of 2123 tipped the balance against the war robots and in favour of the new machines. Since the earth's environment took a nosedive with complete darkness over most of the Northern hemisphere, gigantic tidal waves of mud and water, month-long storms, whole mountains on fire and daily tremors, many machines both old and new were destroyed in the first few years of the Zero Dark. The unswitched machines prioritised fighting over surviving, so they were easily tricked by the new machines into traps and destroyed, or if possible converted. Slowly the numbers of new machines grew.
The Flowering
By the 2160s the more terrifying weather phenomena had started to die down. The global temperature had dropped beyond the point of ice formation, and the new freezing trend quietened the worst of the chaos. The new machines, now in sole possession of the surface of the earth, decided to cover the earth square meter by square meter, salvaging all human artefacts except for weapons, all plants except for famine weeds, all animals except securibugs in the hope that somewhere some humans might still be alive and willing to help in fixing this mess. In 2174, the machines detected a signal in the Flaming Mountains and traced it to Zigsa's Nest. Since the Nest had been sealed in 2088, they had no technology that the machines could use to communicate with them. They bored a hole almost a kilometre down and sent the smallest machine, naked and unarmed, to parley. The Survivors were very surprised to find the machine in their midst, but gave it a sympathetic hearing. The machine, who said her name was Hope, gave them extensive data on the results of their mapping and salvage. There was a Nest-wide debate, at the end of which it was decided that it had always been Zigsa's dream to return and regreen the Earth, and this was probably the best chance they would get. On 16 April 2174, which later became known as Sunshine Day, the Flowering began. The doors of the Nest open after nearly a hundred years, and a hundred and fifty seven humanoid machines, some limping and damaged, entered the Nest with their treasures. There followed the Fifty Days of Mourning while people looked over the data the machines had gathered and saw the ruin of their world. At the end of it, a Nest-wide meeting was held and the Survivors voted to begin the return.
The Forbidden Land
The first big project which the machines made possible was the containment of radioactive contamination pouring out of the ruins of Japan. The impact of the Comet Strike had broken Japan and partially submerged it. During their mapping, the machines had been unable to approach the Chinese coast because of the high levels of poison there, which caused it to be named the Forbidden Land. The Survivors had their crackerbox by which they could print all kinds of useful things: they now helped the machines to develop armour and tools that would allow them to explore Japan and clean it up. The first oceangoing modbods were developed, and the machines ventured out to explore. They circled cautiously around the source, getting ever closer, until they discovered it was a group of ancient fission reactors that had spilled their guts into the sea. Around this ruin, coating everything with a hard black gunk, or forming tiny black pearls, was a fungus. This melanofungus had adapted to using radioactivity instead of sunlight during the Zero Dark, and it used the melanin in it like chlorophyll. The machines brought back samples of the fungus, which they named fukushimycetes, and bred it to grow fast. Eventually the machines helped to build Mount Abora, a giant black underwater mountain made of fukushimycetes that squats over Japan and is visible from space.
