Project: Eternity - Prologue
#2 of Project: Eternity
Well, friends, I know it's been a long, long time since I've posted here, and I'm sorry for that.
This is the opening prologue of a novel that I've been working on for a few months now. I'll be posting the next few chapters in a little bit.
Let me know what you think! <3
All characters (c) Chloe Avonside, aka ChloeTheFirefox
~Chloe
Among all the races that inhabit the stars, one universal rule was established, one that was seen as sacred before everything else. Artificial intelligence was outlawed in every warp-capable society, and despite differing opinions towards the Galactic Council who oversaw peaceful relations between species, it was a rule that everyone abided by. Many had seen the damage that research down that avenue could cause, and those who hadn't, had certainly heard the stories.
Entire civilisations wiped out by their own creations, or turned into nothing more than pets and playthings for their mechanical overlords. Or, in the most extreme and heinous cases, a complete merging of flesh and steel; AI implants, fused directly with the soul of its host.
The Aeteri, one of the first, and most ancient races in the galaxy, had experimented with such technology with disastrous results. Millennia upon millennia ago, they had worked to blur the line between flesh and machine with such resolve, that at the time of their fall at the hand of their own creations, there had been whispers of the unthinkable: successfully transferring a person's consciousness, their very soul, into a soulless automaton.
The three other dominant races of that era, the Pariea, the Quanoc, and the Yald, banded together to fight this new threat: the machine fleets of the Aeteri's own creation, spilling outward from their space in an unrelenting wave of destruction and conquest. The Machine Wars, as they came to be known, raged on for centuries, and throughout, other sentient races started to emerge, joining with the Three to fight back the tide. Each new race brought a new way of thinking, new tactics, and more importantly, new ships and troops.
It took a thousand years and an alliance of over thirty civilisations, but the Sarek'pa, the Aeteri's robots, were finally destroyed. And in the many years that followed, the name Aeteri often became synonymous with "dangerous fool", and measures were taken to ensure that a repeat of the Machine Wars never happened. Not only did this include an outright ban on AI research, but organisations were set up by the new Galactic Council, with the sole purpose of making sure that such research was never carried out.
There were also rumours of a more secretive group, tasked with hunting down and eliminating any synthetic life that gained sentience. Such occurrences were, admittedly, rare, but among races that used a robotic workforce, the possibility was always there. Ever present in their minds were the horrors of the Machine War, so they took their charge with deadly seriousness.