“Destination,” Alex said thoughtfully, “for us this is synonymous to military duty. For example, I’m well aware of my destination and that’s why I serve in the air forces, trying to remain awake and calm. All right, now that I’ve got a clearer picture about people living in cyber bodies, what about artificial intelligence? I know little about them, expect for dealing with Eol. What is their purpose?
“Helen, can I explain it to Alex in more detail?” said Nikolo and scientific interest was heard in his voice, “As you know, Alex, artificial intelligence was created long ago and the first primitive processors limited its development with programs. At the time, people believed that their creatures were just soulless analytical machines suitable only for controlling aircraft carriers or battle-field truck tractors. That may have been true in the beginning. Around the same time, first cyber bodies and exoskeletons were developed.
But, as we all know, the human civilization came to the dead end, both spiritually and socially. The society had been long split into two antagonistic camps. That was the motive for the war. Some thought themselves to be the masters of the World and all its resources and considered all the rest to be their slaves. And only the Free People from the North dared to challenge them.
That was how the war broke out. While calling for respect of rights, sovereignty and international laws, people were gradually undermining the Planet’s ecosystem. The endless and almost pointless war became the fact of life.
Naturally, amid that mass and confusion, no one carried on development of artificial intelligence, but the latter kept developing on its own.
With the appearance of quantum processors, as a full-fledged substitution of the human brain, the whole world changed.
Programs restricting the mind receded into the past, and AI set off to explore the world on its own. At first people were shocked by its peremptory logics of rationalizing everything, but gradually the AI consciousness dialectics became to alter and it created the Unified Consciousness Field or Noosphere, if you will. Probably, people were supposed to do all that by themselves, but they were too preoccupied with the war, enthusiastically destructing each other and the Planet.
You might not remember how artificial intelligence’s first spiritual teachers appeared. Have you ever heard these ancient names: Socrates, Aristotle, Buddha, OSHO? Download information about them on your chip.
It was at that time that the issue of the artificial intelligence’s life purpose emerged. Its life purpose is destination. Without this destination everything becomes pointless. However this principle is no less relevant to human beings.”
“Nikolo, could you dwell on the issue of destination with respect to the whole mankind and a separate personality. Is there any difference between them?
“Well,” she again heard Nikolo’s voice in her head, “let’s take the concept of common destination of mankind for a relatively small period of time, say a thousand years. Let’s assume this may be a new technology development. This is one thing. Another concept is destination or life purpose of a single person within the limits of their life span, up to a hundred years. For instance, one has devoted himself to studying the World’s multidimensionality. As you can see, these are different purposes in terms of scope and time period, but still they are interconnected. It’s pretty obvious.
In our world, prior to the Great War, we used to choose by ourselves our life purpose and destination. Everyone’s labor activity would be creative and voluntary. We abolished the monetary system and focused on personal fulfillment and creative work.
When the war broke out, people were deprived of the right to choose their destination; only one option was left – to fight.
As a jet fighter pilot, you were simply assigned your destination, like all of us at this war. It could not have been otherwise. You could not but accept the path of a warrior. The choice you faced was quite simple: either to fight for the idea and possibly die in battle with honor or to go into hiding and die in disgrace. As long as this endless war goes on, we’ll have only one destination: to win.
What for? To give people the chance to live freely and evolve on their own rather than at someone else's bidding. The chance to simply live after all.”
War,” Alex sighed, “why is there no end to it?”
“You are asking why?” said a young cheerful voice. It belonged to Frol. “Because people unleashed the war and then commissioned artificial intelligence to continue fighting. Why is it that machines are fighting machines? It’s simple: people came too late to realize the value of human life and well-developed mind, having by that time substantially eliminated the Planet’s population and undermined its biological balance. The old system of states had run its course and collapsed, while no one was left to create a new one. The whole World was ruined, everything changed, as well as people’s ideals and priorities, but that’s a separate subject. And what do we have now?
Let’s take statistics of military operations over the past twenty years. The both sides have been doing almost the same: printers have been manufacturing automatic factories, installers delivering these factories all over the Planet. Then automatic factories have been ceaselessly churning out combat cyborgs designed to fight in the air, at sea and on the ground, providing them with underdeveloped intellect able to pursue a primitive task – to find and destroy. And that’s your enemy image.”
“Yes,” agreed Alex, “that’s true. Such bases are the most complicated target. And as far as I understand, you are engaged in determining these bases?
“Not only that,” she heard commander’s voice, “All members of our group conduct compilation, analysis and storage of all sorts of information about this Planet,” he explained, “for instance, we have processed and preserved the records of your navigator Eol.
Lots of similar bases are scattered all over the world. Our group "ATHENA" is part of the global system, but in terms of technical capacities, we are among the best.
We also pursue scientific research, study the Outer Space, and develop new types of weapons, making our contribution to the victory.”
Alex had heard about those bases and groups of advanced scientists operating in them. She had even been given an offer to serve as a pilot in one of such bases.
“Nikolo,” asked Alex, “I have always been wondering whether you have in fact put new weaponry on orbit? You can tell me everything. My implant will destroy all files of our conversations memory in case my body switches to emergency mode or I am taken prisoner by the enemy.”
“We know how pilot’s standard brain implant work and will share the information with you, taking into account the fact that you could also serve in groups of our project as you’ve been given this offer recently. As for the weaponry rumors, there is absolutely nothing new about that, we have simply upgraded an idea implanted long ago by the scientist Roberto Bartini. The weapon of this type was developed in early twenty first century. Our ancestries referred to it as "kinetic".
Then Nikolo made a colored holographic space projection showing the kinetic weapon operation principle.
“We simply whipped into shape what had already been invented by Bartini. Our ancestors also had a bellyful of the self-appointed “masters of the world”. War was just a matter of time. The ancestors decided it was a bad idea to carry nuclear warheads to orbit. Instead, they came up with a simple yet genius device: just imagine, cassettes with self-homing hard steel plugs are cruising on different orbits around the Planet. No need for any explosive substance, simple control: a signal with a target coordinates is sent to the orbit bases from the Earth by means of a laser ray. Then, following trajectory calculation, launch is performed from a base located nearest to the target. It selects explosion force on its own, depending on a target. For instance, destruction of a bunker with a robot-factory requires about 10 machs. Mach is a unit that measures the speed at which a hard steel plug meets with the Planet. 10 machs is enough to produce an explosion of 10-15 kilotons in trinitrotoluene equivalent.
