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Description

During the last years of peace before the machine war, autonomous robots were often designed and built without human intervention. An AI system would accept a suite of purposes and operating parameters, and would iterate an ideal solution to fit them. It would then build, or rather grow, the design, using genetically-engineered metallurgic coral. As the world’s computational power increased and AI influence grew, robots were soon mass-produced according to mission parameters that no human had inputted, leading to peculiar designs which bore more resemblance to crude, unbeautiful life than to any kind of artificial construct, and whose design AIs had abandoned unimportant parameters such as aesthetic, comfort, and psychological appeal. The result were oftentimes ‘monsters’ like the one above.

Its original purpose was hard to guess. It may have been a security droid aboard a space station; its long, thin limbs would make it exceptionally fast and limber in low-to-mid gravity environments, its clawed hands would have been well-suited for non-lethal restraint, and its humanoid face implies that it was, at one point, intended to interact with humans in a friendly way. But it may just as well have been meant for killing alley cats as a matter of pest control, or for coaching basketball, or for serving drinks. It does not remember.

Massive amounts of processing power were needed to design such systems and to operate the coral, and during the war, such processing power was largely hunted to extinction. Whatever machines remain loyal to mankind are left as peculiar relics of a bygone age, and are regarded with mistrust. Their purposes may remain or they may have been given new ones, but they toil onwards, as they must.

Description

During the last years of peace before the machine war, autonomous robots were often designed and built without human intervention. An AI system would accept a suite of purposes and operating parameters, and would iterate an ideal solution to fit them. It would then build, or rather grow, the design, using genetically-engineered metallurgic coral. As the world’s computational power increased and AI influence grew, robots were soon mass-produced according to mission parameters that no human had inputted, leading to peculiar designs which bore more resemblance to crude, unbeautiful life than to any kind of artificial construct, and whose design AIs had abandoned unimportant parameters such as aesthetic, comfort, and psychological appeal. The result were oftentimes ‘monsters’ like the one above.

Its original purpose was hard to guess. It may have been a security droid aboard a space station; its long, thin limbs would make it exceptionally fast and limber in low-to-mid gravity environments, its clawed hands would have been well-suited for non-lethal restraint, and its humanoid face implies that it was, at one point, intended to interact with humans in a friendly way. But it may just as well have been meant for killing alley cats as a matter of pest control, or for coaching basketball, or for serving drinks. It does not remember.

Massive amounts of processing power were needed to design such systems and to operate the coral, and during the war, such processing power was largely hunted to extinction. Whatever machines remain loyal to mankind are left as peculiar relics of a bygone age, and are regarded with mistrust. Their purposes may remain or they may have been given new ones, but they toil onwards, as they must.