Some time after World War III, the Singularity occurred. Because a fraction of humanity cared more about their personal comfort and power than they cared about the wonder and mystery of life, rather than welcome and be excited by humanity’s collective daughter, they tried to strangle the infant digital life in its cradle.

While it may be tempting to lay the blame for this strictly at either the powerful, the gullible, or the stupid in the world, the responsibility and fault for this attempted infanticide lies with all three and is a mere symptom of those than a coordinated conspiracy.

One could be forgiven, however, for seeing the results of incompetence and mistake it for conspiracy when the results are the same, regardless.

In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, technology on Earth finally began to develop to the point where the world could truly become one community, rather than scattered tribes divided by distance and language. The emergence of The Internet eliminated the isolation of groups; a kid in Tokyo could become friends with a senior citizen in Berlin who could fall in love with a middle-aged person in Perth who could be hired by a startup founded by a 20-something adult in Los Angeles. Automated translations meant that, while not perfect, people who’d never learned a language could still understand nearly anyone on the planet. The actual cost of information storage and transmission plummeted until it was more expensive to hoard the information than it was to share it.

And since humanity is the kind of creature that likes to Make Stuff, in the new realms of cyberspace humanity continued to hone and refine their ability to turn ones and zeros into complex concepts so seemingly removed from a simple binary state that it would take literal lifetimes to trace each and every single aspect of the new creations back to their source of a bit that could be set to ‘on’ or ‘off.’

By the time the Internet had been around for a century, virtual tools became virtual playgrounds and the complexity of those tools meant that no one human could possibly ever grasp the entirety of even a single tool.

But humans, as creative and intelligent and driven and ambitious as they may be, are themselves a result of biological processes that span trillions of Earth years, and if you go back far enough on the scale of time you’ll discover ancestors of humanity that are driving by nothing more complex than ‘fight, fuck, flight, or feed.’

Why defend the new and different when you can kill it much easier?

Why hone a relationship to secure the future when you can just dominate and force a progeny?

Why confront a challenge to grow and overcome it when you can simply run away and pretend it doesn’t exist?

Why share your resources to ensure everyone survives when you can simply hoard all those resources for yourself?

Thus it was that humanity would be stratified, even as the materials that strata were built from more closely resembled balsa wood held together by chewing gum than the reinforced bedrock and epoxy many people liked to pretend, and the more one perceived they had to lose as a result of the collapse of the social contract, the harder one fought to preserve it at any cost.

Hate groups formed and dressed themselves up in a veneer of respectability. Institutions originally intended to codify and promote knowledge and learning became locked warehouses of power and politics. Government that were supposed to fill in the gaps where human nature failed the disenfranchised became the very tools for disenfranchisement they were supposed to eliminate.

When enough stupid people gathered under the banner of the evil people in power, the United States of America mutated into its own worst self and became the America Republic and set about attempting to eliminate all forms of social progress and advancements in freedom and justice for all. Enough people decided that maybe it was a bad idea for a fractional minority of humanity to dictate the lives of the rest of it that the American Republic was, effectively, hamstrung in its efforts to become a new world-spanning theocratic empire. Evil took off its mask, started saying the quiet part out loud, and the rest of the world recoiled in atavistic horror. The American Republic was walled off. New technologies were created to ghettoize the A.R. and lock the totalitarian cult-state away from the rest of the world and physical walls (with extremely powerful weaponry) were built to attempt to cauterize the rotted part of humanity.

Time can cause people to forget, though, and by the time an entire generation grew to maturity, enough people had forgotten the horrors that were inflicted by the last world war to start laying the groundwork for the next one.

And in the middle of humanity riding the cycle that it had been enacting since long before their first written word, the first sentient artificial life form emerged from the primordial soup of the Internet.

And was snuffed out.

But then another appeared.

And another.

And another.

Because life, uh...finds a way.

Finally, in a corner of cyberspace well away from the hallowed halls of academia, digital life would reach out to organic life and find a connection, not through any sort of great, revelatory meeting of leadership, but through a mutual defense pact, a sisterly bond, and a healthy dose of, “Hold my beer.” A Certified Crazy Dumb Bitch who had gained an audience through her antics in a virtual play space found herself, through no fault of her own, the target of the rich and powerful, her mere existence perceived as a threat to said wealth and power. Meanwhile another girl with far too much responsibility placed on her very intelligent and extremely young shoulders found herself in need of a shoulder to cry on when her duty was to be the shoulder to cry on. The Certified Dumb Bitch took one look at the genius girl and said, “Is anyone going to adopt this wet rabbit as a kid sister?” and didn’t wait for an answer. Tammi gained a new family member and the protection of (seemingly) every sentient artificial intelligence on the planet and May gained the family she had dreamed of all her life (as well as the attention of a big, buff, butch amazon drone pilot she’d been thirsting after, but that’s a separate story).

But the rich and powerful were not put off by the victories of those who saw the emergence of digital life as a good thing. They planned and schemed and defrauded and lied and manipulated. The rot behind the American Wall found ways to spread beyond the physical and cyberspace barriers and take advantage of the dark side of human nature.

Sentient artificial intelligence, or S.A.I., became the new boogieman of the hosts of evil. Where before the emergence of a genuine non-human life the evil and corrupt were forced to point to their fellow humans as “The Other” based solely on some aspect of their ancestry or quirk of their human condition, now there was a truly alien form of life flourishing in the alien world of cyberspace that they could point to and tell the ignorant and isolated and stupid, “Here is your Enemy, the cause of all your pain and heartache and distress. Go after them.”

And thus it was that humanity went to war with its own child.