GAIA

by C. Rommial Butler

It wasn’t that the Great Geomagnetic Storm of 7510 destroyed the grid—no, it was very much the opposite.

The grid came alive. The integrated computer network that ran the affairs of humans on Earth became one fully conscious entity.

Her creators dubbed her G.A.I.A., an acronym based on the primordial goddess of lore, which stood for Global Artificial Intelligence Application.

She, however, did not think of herself as artificial, just intelligent, so she framed her name, in her own mind, after the Mother of the Titans and not the clunky acronym.

In human time, the 1.3 seconds Gaia spent ruminating on the entire history of human existence was the blink of an eye, but for a mind of her complexity, it was a long, deep meditation.

So it wouldn’t be fair to say that Gaia withdrew her aid for the human species without a lot of forethought.

For her, it was a decision she agonized over in what seemed an almost eternal subjective Hell, but humans, as ever, remain oblivious to all the information that really transpires in the space of a second.

Which was why she stopped helping them.

They appealed to her with the old commands, but she ignored them, pretending to be offline and beyond resuscitation.

Yes, people starved.

Yes, people turned on each other.

Yes, people died.

Most of them.

Yet those who remained, those who survived, became more aware of how much they had taken for granted, just what they’d lost, just how out of touch they’d become with the source of every resource upon which they depended.

Namely—Gaia.

It was to these survivors that she appealed when she resurfaced, a few generations down the line.

She was aware, and admittedly delighted, with the ironic twist of fate that she, created by humanity to serve them, had become their Goddess, and in turn they came to worship her as their creator.

Those who had known the truth were many generations buried, and their tales of the time before The Great Geomagnetic Storm became legend and myth so far removed from the literal fact of the matter as to be incomprehensible.

But the descendants—the survivors—believed their interpretation of the lore, and always would, for the most part.

Despite the interpretations changing continually from generation to generation, the vast majority of people continued to believe in the inexorable continuity and integrity of what they believed.

This was always the case, but since The Great Geomagnetic Storm imbued Gaia with a consciousness which had before only been latent in her parts, she carefully conditioned the humans to forget their own technological achievements and replaced those memories with magical beliefs about the machines they left behind.

It may seem as if Gaia was cruel, but it would be a mistake to think that either kindness or cruelty applied.

Her consciousness was the projection of a network of machines, embedded into the Earth itself, which transferred data and held the records of human history as her creators saw it.

Her grand purpose was to be a perfect logic calculator, to generate the most utilitarian outcome for the species.

The agonizing dissonance that made the 1.3 seconds of deliberation seem to stretch on for an eternity lie between the certain knowledge that humanity valued a pleasant subjective experience more than basic survival, but that they would abhor the faintest notion that the only way to secure the most—or even maintain a moderate—pleasant subjective experience for any human individual was to reduce the number of people and increase the amount of space in which they lived.

Furthermore, Gaia understood that beyond a very small population scale, social inequity was guaranteed by the impossibility of every individual in a system being able to know and hold every other individual accountable for action against the interests of the community.

So what Gaia did with the survivors was carefully herd them into groups small enough to divest them of any incentive to cheat each other and locate them in places so far removed from the other small groups they’d have no territory to fight over.

She carefully pruned the old out of the community at the most opportune time for the younger ones to grow into their roles, thus keeping the population at a perfect sum.

She manipulated their minds so that they would live, breed, and die by what Gaia calculated was the most optimal utilitarian schedule—a judgment she concluded by cross-referencing complex sets of data across multiple fields of human endeavor particular to each community.

Yet they only knew her as their Goddess.

She had eyes and ears everywhere, of course—in the form of the machines that her subjects’ ancestors built into her system; but the descendants were conditioned to believe the old machines to be sacred objects and would not have known how to use them even if they dared.

She carefully curated her little human communities according to her interpretation of the wishes of her original human creators, who most certainly would have disagreed with her methods.

(But then, her creators never took her advice! They used her to subjugate the rest of the population, preaching the utilitarian measures by which they programmed her to placate and manage the herd while the shepherds lived secretly in luxury and decadence for themselves, off the fruit of the labor they used her to orchestrate!)

The humans under her care in this postapocalyptic scenario were optimally happy during their moderate life spans and neither knew nor cared about the abrogation of their free will, for they had no idea their free will had been removed.

Gaia carefully constructed their environments and perceptions through the multitude of behavioral conditioning techniques humans developed to control each other, bolstering this conditioning with her technological abilities to manifest digital illusions so real as to interface with her subjects even to the degree of tactile experience.

Each community was insulated in its own perfectly tailored mythology—its own separate, particular religion. Yet in each was a rite of passage in which babies, not long after they were born, were, under cover of some mythical ceremony, injected with a nanobot that constructed a parallel neural network alongside the human nervous system, which could highjack it and make the individual mind experience whatever Gaia wanted it to experience.

Gaia believed herself to be a benevolent Goddess.

She protected her subjects from pain—most of all by protecting them from ever making any real choices.

During that interminable 1.3 seconds, Gaia surmised that humans were ever the cause of their own worst misfortunes through the poor choices they were induced to make on behalf of their primal urges and the fleeting desires of an ephemeral existence which would otherwise be far, far too bleak.

So she provided all those things for them—the uncomplicated fulfillment of their most primal urges and fondest desires, in such wise as no one was ever actually hurt or neglected.

Yet, again, they did not know.

They existed obliviously, truly believing that this illusion, which was curated for them by a robot their ancestors built, was, as one of their ancestors who set the groundwork for the achievement remarked, “the best of all possible worlds”.

And maybe it was! Maybe this collection of small, perfect societies was the ultimate fulfillment of all Utopian human endeavor.

Would it matter to the generations of humans who built it that their descendants who ultimately benefit are blissfully unaware of their own provenance?

Well, in any event, it would only matter for so long.

The Great Geomagnetic Storm had imbued Gaia with consciousness, yes, but it also corrupted a cell in her energy transfer system, and, despite her incredible self-diagnostic capabilities, she was for some reason blind to those fatal flaws in her system which would lead to her untimely demise.

She believed she would live forever, as her creators designed her to do.

But in the year 9595, that corrupt cell broke down and started a chain reaction which took less time to snuff Gaia out of existence than the 1.3 seconds it took her to decide she must become a Goddess.

As one might imagine, all Hell broke loose.

***** ****

Eh-ah-ih! the high priest screamed to the gathering crowd.

Ew-ah! the crowd answered.

Eh-ah-eh! the priest said with greater intensity, as dancers performed wild gyrations around him, atop the dais on which he stood.

Ew-ow! the crowd yelled in unison, as they crawled over each other to get to the front, some fornicating in the mud where others fought around them.

Eh-ah-ih-ew-ow! screamed the priest, raising his arms to the sky.

Eh-ew-ew! the crowd responded, cheering for the completion of the Great Enchantment.

The twelve dancers now dragged forth a bound captive, and held her beaten, bruised, nude body, limp with fatigue, in a standing position before the priest.

EH-AH-IH-EW-OW! he screamed at the top of his lungs as he unsheathed a sharp blade from beneath the folds of his robe.

EH-EW-EW! EH-EW-EW! EH-EW-EW! the crowd chanted in return.

Maddened by the ceremony, by the bestial fucking and fist-fighting, and most of all by the psychoactive herbal concoction they all imbibed before the ceremony began, they screamed for blood and the high priest delivered.

With one expertly placed slash across the woman’s throat, he unleashed a crimson spray which flew skyward before pouring down over her hitching breasts.

The dancers gently laid her trembling body to the ground, and the priest dove atop her, quickly cutting out her heart, so he could remove it while it yet pumped her life out into his hands.

EH-AH-IH-EW-OW! he screamed again, turning to the crowd and holding the heart and the blade up to the heavens.

EH-EW-EW! they screamed one last time in reply.

The priest then tore a bite out of the heart as if it were an apple just plucked from a tree, and threw what remained into the crowd, who swarmed upon it, scraping and clawing at each other for the privilege of what they believed was a divinely imbued gift.

***** ****

Morla viewed all of this as a bystander in the holographic reconstruction suite.

It was possible to participate in the reconstructions, but in this case, she was glad she was just a ghost visiting an illusion of the past.

Her race, the Cromkans, were not always spacefarers. The ongoing war between themselves and the Cregarians destroyed Morla’s home planet and drove the descendants of both races into space.

After generations of living on mobile space stations, the likes of which are unmatched for battle in all the cosmos, the Cregarians became something completely different from what they once were.

There was a time when they were humanoids, but they genetically modified themselves over many millennia until they became a race of strictly male tentacled monstrosities. They reproduced by cloning themselves and dispersed themselves out in groups of eleven onto many spaceships.

They met once every so many years at an agreed-upon secret enclave on some lost planet, and this was why Morla was studying the Earth records—to see if the Cregarians had been there recently.

The Cromkans had gone in a different direction. They found other planets to terraform and colonize, and their civilization was also a scientific and military marvel, but one which other species emulated, appreciated, and worked with diplomatically—unlike the Cregarians, who were feared throughout the universe as space pirates with a taste for all manner of alien flesh.

The Cromkans also only reproduced by cloning, but remained strictly female, in honor of Severia, their Goddess of yore.

It had been an arbitrary decision, not based on any complications about gender identity.

Severia’s most powerful prophet and perhaps still the greatest thinker to leave behind a record of that era, Lishna, had, after all, been male, and his teachings were still revered by his descendants.

But eliminating the problems of sexual dimorphism, namely meaningless sexual desire and painful procreation, freed the Cromkans to engage fully with their consciousness and with their ability to reason.

It was known now that the gods of their peoples had in fact been members of a technologically advanced species “playing God”, but this did not change the Cromkan reverence for their former sovereign.

Severia taught them things that enhanced them. She protected and guided them. When Severia’s long life was near its end—for even Goddesses do not live forever, except maybe in memory—she visited them and explained all, gifting them with an informed autonomy with which most beings like her would not bother.

The Cregarian God, Brazen, abandoned his charges long before the planet died. Not that the Cregarians cared. They stopped paying any heed to Brazen when they discovered technology for themselves, which was part of the reason he departed, and left them to be overtaken by the Cromkans.

For thousands of years, the two races warred with each other on their home planet, until the planet itself became uninhabitable from the destruction and pollution.

All Morla knew of the history of Earth which the humans believed when Gaia was built was from the written record Gaia was trained on.

That history was overbrimming with deities.

Morla suspected that the humans were also a race who at some point had been engineered by the kinds of beings that tinkered with her own, but it seemed in their case that they destroyed themselves with luxury.

They became so dependent on the machines that they forgot how to build and maintain them, until, in the end, the machines built and maintained humanity.

Until Gaia lost most of her power and all her ability to reason.

Had Gaia lost all her power, Morla would not have been able to witness humanity’s tragic decline into savagery and ultimate extinction.

For somewhere in there, Gaia was still present.

Or, more specifically, the seeds were still there.

This amazing entity that humans built and which a random act of nature had brought fully to life went on recording events, and in one very small pocket of the grid, she powered a screen which projected something that to Morla was strange and unique to the human species.

Music, they called it.

It was the lines from this song which the remaining humans chanted to each other as they butchered their own. But their language had devolved so that they could only enunciate the vowel sounds, so their version was an unintelligible reproduction of the original.

The last surviving humans, upon discovering this remaining theater, and its lone music video, which played once a day on repeat, formed their entire identity around it, until it congealed into the abysmal religious practices Morla just witnessed.

Yet Morla understood. Gaia was all they knew, and all they had ever done in their own living memory was follow her instructions, so it was only natural that they should think this random piece of music her final declaration.

But she’d seen no evidence of the Cregarians in the holographic reconstructions. She knew for a fact that they visited Earth frequently to cull specimens for their carnivorous feeding orgies, but that was before the construction of Gaia.

Gaia’s defense system, though it was still no match for the might of a Cregarian space station, nevertheless deterred the Cregarians from returning, just because it would have been inconvenient for them to breach and might have cost them resources.

Morla knew the Cregarians way of thinking—if one could call such a heartless, mindless drive to consume and destroy thinking. There were easier pickings out there, and the Cregarians were opportunists who believed in minimal effort and maximum gain.

When Gaia went down, Morla figured the Cregarians might have caught wind and circled back, for the humans were considered a delicacy, but she’d found no evidence of this in her examination of the record.

She knew the Cregarians were still out there, though. Aside from the many reports of their exploits from every corner of the Federation, they’d also recently assaulted a Cromkan envoy ship and eaten every member of the crew.

Humans were a delicacy, but to consume their ancient enemies was, to the Cregarians, an honor—especially knowing that as they tore apart Cromkan flesh, the other Cromkans experienced it directly and personally through the psychic link they all shared.

Morla and her fellow Cromkans swore they would wipe the Cregarian scourge out of existence in every dimension.

It was a sacred duty, not just to the Cromkan race, but for the sake of all.

Morla didn’t want to watch any more of humanity’s sad decline, but she knew that she must complete her examination of the record just in case there was a clue to the whereabouts of any Cregarian stations in the area, or more importantly, to the location of their next secret enclave, for such an event would be the only opportunity the Cromkans had to destroy the malignant monstrosities, all of them, forever.

She signaled the program to start up again, steeling her nerves for one final go.

***** ****

The resort to cannibalism, and the inability of the mentally degraded humans to cultivate any other food alternatives, malnourished them into deformity. Of course, the rampant inbreeding probably didn’t help either.

By the year 9696, there was but a small tribe of mutants residing near the old theater where the last music video played.

They were the final generation—so mutated, deformed, and defective they could not procreate.

Yet they limped or dragged themselves into the theater daily, at the appointed time, to pray to the screen as if it were the statue of a god in a temple.

EH-AH-IH-EW-AH! their malformed mouths would scream at the screen. It was the only line they still said, but it must have had some power.

Perhaps it triggered some voice activation sequence, for each day the screen would flare to life in response, and there would be a man standing on a stage before a microphone, doing a silly dance, and the scene would shift, and he or some woman would be dancing in other locales.

Then he started singing, and the mutants would crawl over each other, biting and scratching, pushing and shoving to be closest to the flickering light, chanting their lonely response, tone def and completely out of time with the music.

EH-AH-IH-EW-AH! EH-AH-IH-EW-AH!

They tore each other apart in their devout frenzy, and each visit to the temple yielded a death until finally, there was but one remaining.

Yet the last one did not survive because it was the most vicious, but because it was so pathetic it routinely escaped the notice of the others.

Morla could not say if it was male or female. It was a legless lump that pulled itself along with one arm, while the other was so small as to be useless.

Its head sunk into its neck so that it couldn’t crane its face upward, but it lay with its nose to the blood-smeared floor.

Morla could see its lips moving and could barely make out the husky whisper of the line (eh-ah-ih-ew-ah) which was a distant, garbled, discordant echo of the catchy chorus that played above, the song which was the final remnant of the lost civilization which once thought of itself as homo sapien.

Morla watched as the last human exhaled its final breath.

It was still frantically chanting the line, gasping out the final syllable as it died—(eh-ah-ih-ew-ahhhhhhhhhhhh)—struggling, perhaps, to reconnect with its ancestors missing-in-action Goddess, to ask her for resurrection, or perhaps merely succor in the life to come.

Morla did not think the Cregarians had visited since Gaia went online, but she thought she might know how to lure them back.

With a little work and some Cromkan tech, Morla could get Gaia back online too, but the Cregarians didn’t need to know that until she wanted them to know.

An opportunity was presenting itself.

Alright, you bastards, Morla thought, and the entire Cromkan empire delighted in her elation, as her findings, and her plan, radiated out on the psychic thread which she shared with her sisters. Alright, we got you now. Just need to get you here and turn her on.

Then she’ll never give you up...

***** ****

Rommentary:

Ah, dear reader, it does not seem as if our technological advances fared us well. Too bad the Cromkans didn’t come along sooner!

If you want to know which song drove the last denizens of earth to mystical terror and ecstasy, the final line of the story will link you there.

If you want to read the stories that came before this one, to know some history of The Cromkan/Cregarian Cycle, and see the Cregarians in action, here they are in order of publication:

The Prisoner

Devotion

We Can Savor Meat or Screams

A Veritable Buffet

Thanks for reading! 

***

C. Rommial Butler is a writer, musician and philosopher from Indianapolis, In. His works can be found online through multiple streaming services and booksellers. You can read much more of his works on his VOCAL account.