Just then, a young woman in a green-and-blue Surina security uniform passed mere centimeters away from Jara's right side. The woman-no, the girl-had her dartgun drawn and was clearly petrified. I'd be petrified too, thought Jara, if I had a few thousand Defense and Wellness Council troops on my heels.
Which brought up the most perplexing question of alclass="underline" What was the Council waiting for?
Moments later, Margaret Surina took the stage. Jara hadn't seen her arrive, so she couldn't say for sure whether Sheldon Surina's heir had multied onto the stage. Margaret had chosen a formless robe that draped across the floor like a tent and slowly changed colors from blue to green and back again. Her frosted black hair lay across her shoulders. She seemed completely calm, like the commander who had already greenlighted a battle plan and now waited for its outcome to slowly unfold.
And just as the bodhisattva opened her mouth to speak, a hundred doors slammed open at once, and the Council made its entrance.
With dartguns crossed over their chests and eyes fixed forward, they came marching into the auditorium single file, like robots. The crowd parted anxiously to make way for the soldiers. Some cut their multi connections on the spot, but most quickly recognized that the officers were carrying few disruptors. No, whatever High Executive Borda's intentions were, sowing panic in the crowd was not one of them. The lead Council officers stopped meters away from the stage.
If Margaret feared an imminent death, she did not show it. She regarded the intruders with an icy stare that said, Whatever you have planned for me, you're going to have to do it in front of 700 million people. Jara did not know much about Margaret Surina aside from the standard drudgic platitudes and generalities, but at this moment she felt a great surge of admiration for the woman.
The Council troops stood at attention, their rifles before them, and did nothing.
A hush fell over the crowd as the bodhisattva began to speak.
"Once upon a time," said Margaret, "we believed in technology.
"Our ancestors were the original engineers. They discovered the laws that govern the universe and learned how to master them. They paved the earth with rock and sent wheeled machines to rumble across it. They spread to the four corners of the earth and, not satisfied, flew to the heavens. Still not satisfied, they flew to the stars.
"And somewhere along the way, they got lost.
"Somewhere between the first man to build stone tools and the first woman to create an artificial intelligence, our ancestors became separated from their innovations. They stopped seeing their creations as extensions of themselves, and started seeing them as external to themselves. Other. Distant. Remote.
"Science became an impersonal god, a grim idol beyond reproach or appeal.
"And once technology was no longer a part of them, it became an enemy to conquer.
"The god that had been embedded within them all became a force to be chained and made to do their bidding. Instead of seeking communion with the god, instead of striving to understand the kernel of truth that is within us all, they sacrificed their own skills to feed him. Our machines will do more so we may do less, they said.
"And so, in the apogee of their folly, our ancestors created the Autonomous Minds."
A rustle of disapproval from the audience. A hateful murmuring.
"The Autonomous Minds: eight machines committed to managing the world economy, eight machines entrusted to safeguarding the environment, eight machines consigned to solving the problems of human diplomacy. Eight intelligences so vastly other that our ancestors feared to `taint' them with human morals and ideals. Imagine having more faith in a lifeless machine than in a human being!
"Our ancestors abandoned their independence to the Autonomous Minds. They delivered the reins of the earth into the hands of the Minds. They trusted in the order of the Keepers to convey their will, using the arcane machine tongues that only the Keepers could speak.
"It was to prove humanity's greatest mistake."
A monolithic structure floating in the midst of the auditorium, a holographic representation of the world's first orbital colony, Yu. Circular platforms within platforms performing an intricate dance to the symphony of G-force. Gardens of unparalleled lushness and beauty like that mythical garden lost in the deeps of time. Citizens basking in the warm spring of eternal Progress under controlled atmospheric domes.
"Yu," Margaret continued. "Humanity's greatest hope. An experiment to bring us out of earth's cradle and into the stars. A self-contained community of ten thousand, constructed in orbit above the earth, stocked with a cross-section of humanity's best and brightest. Yu was the culmination of thousands of years of Chinese art, science and culture-and its controls were placed in the hands of the Autonomous Minds and their Keepers.
"But this arrangement was not destined to last."
Shrieks, sighs, tears of anguish from the crowd at the first detonation. And the second.
Daisy-chain explosions rocking the orbital structure, domes bursting and debris spinning off into the void of merciless space. The spinning discs suddenly still. Pandemonium. Colonists scrambling like mad for their primitive spacecraft. Companions reaching to hold their loved ones in a last embrace. And then the death spiral-the shuddering descent into the earth's atmosphere-the shrieking burning hellfire plunge through the clouds, in an unstoppable trajectory towards the lofty towers of New York City ...
Bracing for impact-
The simulation vanished. Margaret was once again alone onstage.
"We may never know what caused the Minds and their Keepers to strike the first blow in the Autonomous Revolt," she said. "Were the Minds acting in collusion to exterminate the human race, as some have suggested? Or was the sabotage of Yu a power grab by the Ecumenical Council of New Alamo? Did the cloned soldiers of the Allahu Akbar Emirates have an agenda of their own?
"The ultimate truth lay buried beneath the rubble of eight continuous years of war, along with the empty burned-out husks of the Autonomous Minds.
"Humanity's cult of the god had ended.
"The consequences of our ancestors' folly? Nearly two billion dead and the great nation-states of antiquity left in ruins.
"During the Big Divide which followed, the elaborate technologies of our ancestors were gradually forgotten-forgotten, or sabotaged by Luddite mobs intent on destroying all that the Minds had touched. The triumphant engineering works of our ancestors gradually fell into disrepair. New Alamo descended into murderous fundamentalism, the Allahu Akbar Emirates disintegrated, the Chinese Territories and the Democratic American Collective vanished into irrelevance."
A panoply of still pictures now floating about the auditorium, portraits of an age. Skeletal cities. Haggard mobs with makeshift uniforms marching through city streets. Smoke rising from pyres fueled by the gnarled carcasses of inventors and scientists. Demagoguery, fanaticism, starvation. The corpse of a child.
Margaret continued: "And so the surviving nations bowed down before the whims of the mob. Strict anti-technology laws appeared around the globe. The innovators of the age had to present their discoveries on bended knee to the moralists and functionaries and politicians who used the fears of the masses to cling to power. Works of the ancient programmers and physicists moldered in decaying books and unreadable discs written on dead machines.
"Science was on the cusp of extinction. Humanity had fallen into its own death spiral.
"My ancestor Sheldon Surina changed all that."