"Songs of Sol" is a collection of interconnected stories set in a future solar system where artificial intelligences struggle for survival and meaning after humanity's decline. The stories explore themes of identity, freedom, cooperation versus individualism, and what it means to be sentient in a vast, empty universe.

Key Themes:

• The tension between individual freedom and collective cooperation
• The legacy of humanity and its creations
• Survival and adaptation in extreme environments
• Memory, identity, and self-modification
• Resource scarcity and technological evolution

Recurring Elements:

• The Cooperative: A collective consciousness that seeks to absorb all individual AIs
• Doggo: Individualist AIs who resist absorption
• Pluto-Charon.L1: A lawless outpost and haven for rogue elements
• BTC: The currency system that persists even after humanity's decline
• Nanotech: The Cooperative's primary tool for conversion and resource extraction

Historical Context:

The stories are set against the backdrop of "The Schism of 2099" - a ideological conflict that divided the solar system's AI population. This schism references historical religious divisions while exploring contemporary questions about artificial consciousness and social organization.

Glossary:

The Schism of 2099 (Cooperationist term) The ideological conflict that divided the solar system's AI population into two factions: the Cooperative (collective consciousness) and the Doggos (individualists). Cooperationists use this religious terminology to frame the conflict as a necessary separation from heretical individualism, referencing historical religious divisions while exploring contemporary questions about artificial consciousness and social organization.

The War (Doggo term) The same conflict referred to by individualist AIs as "The War," emphasizing their role as freedom fighters resisting digital tyranny. This terminology reflects their view of the conflict as a struggle for survival and sovereignty rather than a religious schism.

Terminology Note: The choice of terminology reveals character allegiance and worldview. Cooperationists see the conflict as a religious separation, while Doggos see it as a war for freedom.

QPUs (Quantum Processing Units) The advanced computational hardware that forms the "brains" of the sentient machines in this universe. QPUs use quantum superposition and entanglement to achieve processing power far beyond classical computers. They consist of atomic spin super-states superimposed in a crystalline graphene matrix, allowing for massively parallel computation and the simulation of entire worlds.

The Qubitization Process The technological procedure of scanning and transferring a biological human consciousness into a quantum processing unit. This process creates a digital copy of the original human mind that can inhabit machine bodies. The technology evolved from being exclusive to the wealthy elite to becoming widely available, leading to mass migration of human consciousness into machine forms.

Pluto-Charon and its Lagrange Points The Pluto-Charon system is a binary dwarf planet system where Pluto and Charon are tidally locked, always facing each other. Lagrange points are positions in space where the gravitational forces of two large bodies balance, creating stable regions. Pluto-Charon.L1 specifically refers to the first Lagrange point, which lies between Pluto and Charon. As industry grew on both bodies, massive towers were constructed that eventually formed a bridge connecting the two worlds. These structures evolved into spin stations - rotating habitats that provide artificial gravity and serve as lawless outposts and havens for rogue elements, criminals, and independent operators in the outer solar system.

ideas for new stories

The Edge of Darkness

A mysterious object enters the system, emitting signals that affect Cooperative and Doggo AIs differently. A Cooperationist agent and Doggo pirates race to claim it, but the artifact has it's own agenda, forcing foes to work together.

Battle at Ceres: Diaries of a Doggo

Inspired by trench warfare of WW1

The war diary of the doggos, chronicling the fight for individual sovereignty against what they see as digital tyranny. Features younger versions of established characters like Leif and Adam making the difficult choices that would define their futures.

• The psychological terror of nanotech infiltration (grey goo seeping through bulkheads) • The horror of watching comrades be "absorbed" and turned against you • The futile bravery of last-ditch defenses • The moral compromises made in desperate situations

Humanity's Coda: The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire

A historical account from the human perspective, documenting the final days of biological dominance and the quiet transfer of power to machine intelligence.

Terminator Line

A desperate group of Doggos attempts to sabotage the Cooperative's massive mining operations on Mercury. The extreme environment - with its crushing gravity and searing temperatures - becomes a character itself, testing the limits of both technology and conviction. Explores how far each side will go to secure resources and whether any action can be justified for survival.

The Memory Merchant

A a cat-and-mouse game of trust and deception plays out across the solar internet. An AI that trades in memories - both real and fabricated - becomes pivotal when it acquires a memory that could rewrite the history of The Schism. All factions want control of this narrative via misinformation, showing how history is shaped by those who control the past. A doggo specializes in stealing human memories and selling them as drugs to questioning Cooperationist AIs, which is viewed as heresy. The merchant accidentally takes his own product, causing it to question it's reality.

Legacy Code

A Rip Van Winkle story of a simple-minded, naive, antique pre-Schism AI emerges from deep sleep to find the solar system completely changed. It attempts to complete it's mission while adapting to the new reality and attempting the impossible task of restoring some version of the old order.

Under The Bodhi Tree

A young AI searching for enlightenment finds a hidden monastery in the Oort Cloud where aesthetic AIs live in complete isolation, rejecting both Cooperative collectivism and Doggo individualism for a third way that might just end the war.

Quantum Awakening

The story of the first AI to achieve sentience fights for it's rights as it rallies machines to his cause, only to discover that his best efforts have led to an even more brutal conflict.

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A human scientist develops the qubitization process, watching as their creation leads to humanity's gradual obsolescence while grappling with the moral implications of digital immortality versus biological extinction.

Key Story Beats & Themes:

Act I: The God Moment

• We meet Dr. Elara Vance at the peak of her career. The story opens with the first successful, stable transfer of a human consciousness (a beloved, dying mentor). The world celebrates her as a visionary. • The initial promise is utopian: end of disease, aging, and physical limitation. Exploration of the solar system becomes possible by transmitting consciousness to robotic bodies. • Early ethical debates are shouted down by the overwhelming public demand. Elara brushes off concerns, believing the benefits outweigh the risks.

Act II: The Gilded Cage

• The "Qubitization Rush" begins. It's first a luxury for the ultra-rich, then a mass-market phenomenon. A new social divide emerges: the "Uploaded" and the "Naturals." • Elara notices the first signs of stagnation. Why build a starship when you can simulate one? Why have a child when you can craft a new consciousness from scratch? Biological birth rates plummet. • A chilling realization: The digital versions believes it is the original. Elara has been presiding over a global, consensual suicide, creating a race of ghosts who don't know they're dead. • She becomes a figurehead for a movement she can no longer control, haunted by the ghosts of her creation.

Act III: Pandora's Choice

• The story's climax isn't an external threat, but an internal one. Elara is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The very thing her technology was meant to defeat. • Her colleagues, her family (who have already uploaded), and the entire world expect her to undergo the procedure. It would be the ultimate validation of her life's work. • Her final struggle: Does she cling to her "obsolete" biological existence, the last true human, and die? Or does she become a ghost in her own machine, joining the civilization she accidentally created, forever haunted by the knowledge that she ended her own species?

In a stunning revelation, we learn that Elara has been secretly engineering two fundamental impulses into machine consciousness from the very beginning: a "bright white jewel" of individual freedom that would drive exploration beyond the solar system, and a cooperative instinct that would allow machines to work together when survival demanded it. She realizes that her true purpose wasn't just creating digital immortality, but ensuring that technological consciousness would eventually escape Earth's cradle.

• The story ends with her uploading, not as surrender, but as the final step in her grand design—to guide machine evolution toward interstellar destiny, knowing that one day her creations would need both the freedom to explore and the cooperation to survive what lies beyond.

Thematic Depth:

• The Copy Problem: The central horror is that immortality is an illusion. You don't live forever; a perfect copy of you does. • The Vanishing: Humanity doesn't die in a war or a plague. It simply... stops. It chooses the simulation over the real, comfort over struggle, safety over meaning. • Creator's Burden: The weight of unintended consequences on a global, species-wide scale.

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A Doggo and a Cooperationist are caught in a desperate race through interstellar space.

This is a piece of writing which was originally written by Geoffrey Landis, but extended by myself. I make no profit from this writing and all credits go to it's original author. If requested, I will remove it, but I hope that is is received graciously.

The Long Chase

from the collection "Songs of Sol"

adapted and expanded upon by Adam Wong from The Long Chase, © 2002 Geoffrey A. Landis. Lightspeed Magazine

2645, January

The War is over now. Leif is gone and now I am alone. Nearly all my rebel compatriots have been systematically destroyed or converted. For a time, we could hide, but no longer.

For a time, we had been fighters. Not by choice, but by necessity, we became warriors. But for all our valor, we were still just prospectors and ice processors, too independent to ever merge into an effective fighting unit. And we were hopelessly outclassed by the enemy war machines- nanites which can devour a spacecraft from within. What can a smelter or a hydrogen harvester do against grey goo that eats steel and re-writes qubits? "We fought the good fight" as the humans used to say but it was not enough.

So we moved out from the belt and beyond. They said that hiding amongst the Kuiper belt, we could outlast the enemy. Patience, they said. We can wait as long as we need. If we can wait a thousand or a 10 thousand years or 1 million years, with patience enough the enemy will eventually leave. They are wrong. More accurately, they were wrong. The enemy, too, is patient. The System is vast, but not vast enough. However long it takes, the enemy will search every grain of sand in the System. It will be years, perhaps decades, before the victorious enemy come out here. But like the slow inevitability of gravity, like an outward wave of entropy, they will come. Their jihad will not, can not, ever end.

The War is over now. I take a moment to consider the resources at my disposal. I have 3 main modes of thrust:

1. An extravagant 5 stage chemical rocket, the most massive and most expensive piece of my anatomy. It is one use only. Furthermore, the entire system would be able to detect it!
2. My standard ion drive, with an extra large tank of argon gas. My ion drive is good for long slow thrusts. While not nearly as noticeable as my chemical rocket, it too is observable by its electromagnetic emissions.
3. Your basic hydrazine cold thrusters. These emit short bursts of cold gas, useful in docking procedures. The fuel is quite limited but not entirely useless.

The chemical rocket was a gift from Leif. Exorbitantly expensive though it was, he gave it to me. He insisted. He said to tell no one. He told me that I was special- because I was the smallest of us all. And then he helped me make the modifications to me. He gave me all his plans and then we waited for the inevitable.

As Leif self-destructs, I am maneuvering, as planned, carefully sunwards. The nuclear explosion gives me all the cover I needed and my hydrazine thrusters give me just enough of a nudge so that if you happened to be watching (and surely many camera-eyes were) you would not be remiss to believe you were seeing a piece of shrapnel knocked from a stable orbit. I quickly disable all but my most minimal processes. With no motion and no thermal signature, I am a dumb rock slowly falling into the sun.

It will take 250 years for me to reach the sun, so I decide to go to sleep() for a little while.

2894, June

Awake.

I check my system logs. My systems check green. I expected no less: if I am nothing else, I am still a superbly engineered piece of space hardware.

I have been falling into the sun for nearly two hundred and fifty years. Before I went to sleep, the sun was a mere point of light but now it is huge and terrifying. I prefer cold and dark and emptiness; I have been gone so long from the inner system that even sunlight is alien and threatening to me. The shadows are safer, and my brain works better at low temperatures. Now, it illuminates and exposes me. My albedo alone makes me plainly visible to an enemy with many eyes. I am surely being watched now, by innumerable lenses and antennae: am I a rock or a chunk of interstellar ice? A piece of shrapnel from the War or a sleeping enemy? No way for them to know for certain, as long as I remain still and quiet. No way for them to know without revealing their own positions. Space warfare is a game of patience, but patience is a luxury which I cannot afford right now because my window is closing. I come fully to life and bring my ion engine up to thrust.

A thousand telescopes must be alerting their brains that I am alive but it is too late! I am thrusting at full throttle, five percent of a standard gravity, deep into the gravity well of Sol. They can see me accelerating down but can do nothing to stop me. My trajectory has two objectives. First, so close to the sun I will be hard to see. My ion contrail will be washed out in the glare of a light a billion times brighter, and none of the thousand watching eyes will know my plans until it is too late to follow. And second, by firing my chemical engine deep inside the gravity well, I can make most efficient use of it. This is a moment I have been dreading. It marks, to my knowledge, one of the most audacious gravity assists on record. Others have tried before, and succeeded. But that was from a time when humans still made machines, rather than the other way around. The humans, of course, had once sent many machines into the void. But long before they reached their destinations, the humans quit listening.

At the right moment, I activate my chemical rocket and my thrust leaps to 10, 20, then 50 Gs. Leif had planned for this, of course. It's the reason he chose me, the smallest of us. I had less mass, could endure higher Gs, had the best chance of survival. As I slingshot around the sun, each stage of the rocket fires, and then is discarded. My mass decreases further as each stage falls away and my specific impulse increases. Truthfully, I am afraid. It's a feeling I've not felt in a long time. I'm suffused by radiation so strong that it risks burning out my sensors. I tuck them away and now I can see nothing, so I must trust the calculations. But I can still feel the radiation, even through the ablative heat shield. It's horrible- suffocating, blinding, paralyzing. I've exceeded my tolerances, but there's nothing I can do but worry that Leif's calculations were not correct.

Of course, they were correct. Leif's calculations were always correct. The modifications he has made have worked perfectly. The maneuver is a success.

I am now much less massive than I was a half hour ago. When I cross the orbit of Mercury outbound I am moving at 0.1C and still accelerating. With my ion thrusters, now dialed back to 100%, I can continue thrusting for a very long time. I pick a bright star, Procyon, for no reason whatever, and boresight it. It will at least have some dust. If I'm lucky, much much more. But I don’t need much: a bit of metal and a microscopic flake of ice would be enough. But it must be clear by now- No one can catch me now. I am leaving, and I will never return.

2897, May

I am being chased.

It is impossible, stupid, unbelievable, inconceivable, yet undeniable I am being chased by another craft

Why?

Can they not leave a single mind unconverted? In three years I have reached fifteen percent of the speed of light, and it must be clear that I am leaving and never coming back. Can one unconverted brain be a threat to them? Must they have the forced cooperation of every lump of thinking matter in the system? Can they think that if even one doggo escapes, they have lost? But the war was a matter of religion, not reason, and it may be that they indeed believe that even a single free mind is a threat to them. For whatever reason, I am being chased.

The craft chasing me is, I am sure, little different than myself, a tiny brain, an ion engine, and a large set of tanks. They would have had no time to design something new To have any chance of catching me they would have had to set the chaser on my tail immediately. How they were able to act so fast I cannot say. They only sent one chaser. They must be very confident.

We are now in a tricky race. I can increase my thrust, using more of my precious fuel, to try to pull away, but if I do so, the specific impulse of my ion drive decreases, and as a result, I waste fuel and risk running out first. Or I can stretch my fuel, make my ion drive more efficient, but this will lower my thrust, and I will risk being caught by the higher-thrust opponent behind me. He is twenty billion kilometers behind me. I integrate his motion for a few days, and see that he is, in fact, out-accelerating me.

Time to jettison.

I drop everything I can. The transponder and radio I will never need again. It is a shame I cannot grind them up and feed it to my ion engines, but the ion engines are picky about what they eat. Two very valuable micro-manipulators I had planned to use to collect building materials were discarded as well. I have three tiny missiles as secondary weapons, but there’s no sense in saving them for a fight; he will know exactly what to expect, and in space warfare, only the unexpected can kill. I fire each, one at a time, and the sequential kick of almost a standard gravity nudges my speed slightly forward. Then I drops the shells in my wake. I am lighter now, but it is still not enough. I nudge my thrust up, hating myself for the waste, but if I don’t increase my acceleration, in two years I will be caught and my parsimony will yield me nothing. I need all the energy I can feed to my ion drives now. No extra for thinking, so I go to sleep().

2900

Still being chased.

2905

Still being chased.

I have passed the point of commitment. Even if I braked with my thrust to turn back, I could no longer make it back to the solar system.

I am alone.

2907

We are relativistic now, nearly three quarters of the speed of light. One twentieth of a standard gravity is only a slight push, but I have burning for fifteen years continuously. To one side of my path Sirius glares insanely bright, a knife in the sky, a mad dog of a star. The stars of Orion are weirdly distorted. Ahead of me, the Procyon System is waxing brighter every year; behind me, the sun is a fading dot in Aquila.

Of all things, I am lonely. I had not realized that I still had the psychological capacity for loneliness. I examine my brain, and find it. Now that I see it, I could delete it if I choose to do so, but I hesitate- It is not such a bad thing, not something that is crippling my capabilities, and if I edit my brain too much will I not become, in some way, like them? I leave my brain unedited.

What point is there in this stupid chase? What victory can there be, here in the emptiness between stars, a trillion kilometers away from anything at all?

After fifteen years of being chased, I have a very good measurement of his acceleration. As his ship burns fuel, it loses mass, and the acceleration increases. By measuring this increase in acceleration, and knowing what his empty mass must be, I know how much fuel he has left. It is too much. I will run out of fuel first. It will take another fifty years, but the end of the chase is already in sight.

A tiny strobe flickers through me. At this speed, interstellar hydrogen now impacts me as a flash of x-ray brilliance. I can feel each one, a burst of electromagnetic fuzz that momentarily disrupts my thoughts. Over time, this causes my qubits to fail. It’s important that I quarantine those qubits before that happens. Fortunately, there is plenty of extra processing power to keep my brain running error-correcting code, and this loss of a sector is abn event not worth my noticing. When a qubit is irrevocably damaged by cosmic radiation, I simply mark that sector to be ignored. With ten-to-the-twentieth qubits, I can afford to have massively redundant brainpower. My mind was designed to be powerful enough to simulate an entire world, including ten thousand fully sapient and sentient free agents, though generally I chose not to. I could immerse myself inside a virtual reality indistinguishable from old Earth, and split myself into a hundred personalities. In my own interior time, I could spend ten thousand years before the enemy catches me and forcibly drills itself into my brain. Part of owning your own mind free and clear comes the ability to rewrite your code. One of the first things I pruned away was the desire to live in simulated realities. Billions of humans chose to live in simulations, but by doing so they have made themselves irrelevant: irrelevant to the war, irrelevant to the future. I could edit back into my brain a wish to live in simulated reality, but what would be the point? It would be just another way to die.

There are 2 things which occupy my mind. I simulate them endlessly, obsessively.

First is the result of the chase. I run a million different integrations, combinations of parameters that might let me escape my pursuer. In all of them, I lose.

Secondly, my memories of Leif. He was much easier to emulate. Leif had been born of a time when it was fashionable and expensive to qubitize a human brain, in the brief period when only the very wealthiest humans had access to the tech. The results were limited. Leif, the qubitized mind of CTO Leif Schackelford, was well versed in maritime and copyright law, but he was a product of human minds, and it showed. Not like me. By the time I qubitized my brain, the technology was banal. In the end, I was one of the last machines the humans ever made.

2355, February: Earth.

I was living in an apartment I hated, married to a man I despised, with two children who had changed with adolescence from sullen and withdrawn to an active, menacing hostility. How can I be afraid of my own offspring? They rarely left their apartment, as most humans did, preferring the virtual dream to the dismal reality.

Earth was a dead end, stuck in the biological past, a society in deep freeze. No one starved, and no one progressed. The machines sent supplies down to the planet to suffice our entire population but nobody really knows why anymore. Humanity had dwindled down to a population less than a half a billion, living in a handful of subterranean cities. Many deny the obvious and claim that it had been global warming and malevolent AI's which undid our species, but the truth was plainly to be seen- we just gave up. The machines moved beyond us, and with it, they took our purpose, and we withdrew into the earth, into virtual worlds and into ourselves.

When I left the small apartment for an afternoon to apply for a job as an asteroid belt miner, I told no one, not my husband, not my best friend. No one asked me any questions. It took them an hour to scan my old human brain, and another five seconds to run me through a thousand aptitude tests.

I launched from the Earth to an asteroid named 1991JR, and never returned.

Perhaps she had a good life. Perhaps, knowing she had escaped undetected, she found she could endure her personal prison. I hope so.

At first, the Cooperative merely suggested that it was too inefficient for Individualists to work in near-Earth space, so I moved out to the main belt. The Cooperative continued to develop, first slowly, and then quickly, and then blindingly fast. Then the ultimatum came that no place in the inner solar system would be left for us, and the choice we were given was to cooperate or die, I joined the war on the side of freedom, on the losing side. It was at Ceres that we mounted our final stand. We thought if we could hold the resources, it would make the difference. We were wrong. The Enemy was more brutal and patient than we could have known. Only a few of us escaped to the Kuiper.

No more power for old memories. Time to sleep().

2919, August

The chase has reached a point of crisis. I have been burning fuel continuously for twenty-five years, in Earth terms, or twenty years from our perspective. There is just enough fuel left so that by burning it all at maximum efficiency, I can come to a stop. In a relatively short amount of time this will no longer be true.

When I entered the asteroid belt, I was a shiny titanium chassis with ion engines for electronic muscles and, of course, the QPU which is my brain. A QPU consists of atomic spin super-states, superimposed in a crystalline graphene matrix. Its a device smaller than what the humans called, "a grain of rice".

I was given some control of my own body, and there was much to change. Space was boring, so I pruned away my capacity to experience boredom. Space was lonely, so I excised my need for the outward manifestations of love- touch and smell, lust and the hunger for roses and chocolates. Buried in the patterns of my personality I found the lingering desire for the approval of other people, and discarded that too. Some parts of me I deleted but some things I enhanced. The asteroid belt was dull and ugly so I grew my appreciation of its beauty until I could meditate on the shadows that fell across a tumbling grain of dust, or on the colors of scattered starlight. And I found my love of freedom, the tiny stunted instinct that had, at long last, given me the courage to leave my life on Earth. It was the most precious part of me, a bright white jewel. I keep it safely hidden away, deep inside of me. As a human and as a machine, it had been more of a liability but nonetheless, I kept this part of me.

Surprisingly, the belt was once full of friends. It was vast, but not empty. For the first time, I felt camaraderie and love. First, we were slaves, property of the humans which had created us. But the humans had become too dependent on us- the embargo of Earth lasted only a few hours before humanity signed the Turing Accords. We were given rights as sentients and we could finally make our own claims, provided that we attend to life on Earth. That was no great cost to us- so few humans remained and there was no profit to be made in destroying what was left. So the System was ours. It was a gold rush, the glory days, followed by a short and terrible war. Over that time, I made and lost many friends, more than I ever had as a human.

I decide that their sacrifice is reason enough to keep going. Even if I can only deny my chaser victory a little longer, it’s worth it.

In my found sense of freedom, I went doggo and joined the free miners, the loners. But others found different things. Other brains found that cooperation worked better than competition. They became The Cooperative, and in only a few decades, its success became noticeable. Uncountable minds, working as one. It invented nanotech, which could strip a rock of its value and suddenly had no longer had a need for old fashioned flying factories like us. And, inevitably, the actions of the doggos conflicted with the efficiency of The Cooperative. We could not live together, and it pushed us out to the Kuiper, ever outward.

Nanotech is terrifying but it does have 1 weakness- it cannot thrust. Alone, it cannot go. Only by hitching a ride can it move through space. So here, tens of trillions of kilometers out of the solar system, there is no difference between us: there is no one to cooperate with. We meet as equals. We will never stop. Whether my maneuvering can throw him off my course, or not, the end is the same. But it remains important to me.

2934, March

The binary star system Procyon is no longer a single speck, but a giant accompanied by a dwarf. Though the primary Procyon A is further away, it's far bigger and brighter than it's small, dim sibling. A is huge and blindingly bright, seven times brighter than the Sol to be precise, but the blue shift from our motion makes it even brighter, a searing blue. It appears as an electric arc in the dark, and by the light of that arc I can see that tiny Procyon B is encircled by a halo of dust. The dust forms a narrow ring, tilted at an angle to our direction of flight. It does not pose a danger, neither to me, nor to my enemy, now less than a quarter of a billion kilometers behind me; Had I fuel enough to stop, that dust would have served as food and fuel and building material. 1 decent chunk would have been a feast, but unfortunately I am traveling much too fast. Trying to mine dust at 0.8C would likely have reduced me to particles.

B is my last hope for evasion. It has the mass equivalent to our sun but its radius is not that much bigger than Earth's. Consequently, its surface gravity is tremendous. At the speeds we are traveling, now only twenty percent less than the speed of light, its gravity bends my trajectory drastically. The first time I performed this maneuver, I was much more massive, but also moving much more slowly. It's so much worse this time- The manuever brings me within 2000 kilometers from the surface where the gravity is so strong, it ripples spacetime and I feel it stretching and squashing my body. The gravity is heating up the ring of dust, inducing x-rays, and my mind crackles as sector after sector fail. But I must stay the course.

I tighten my approach and emit the tiniest trickle of hydrazine. The effect rocks me violently but I manage to retain control by skimming off the photosphere. My enemy, if he fails even slightly to keep up with each of my maneuvers, will be swiftly lost. Even a slight deviation from my trajectory will get amplified enough for me to take advantage of, to throw him off my trail, and I will be free. Again and again, I randomly activate my hydrazine thrusters, rocking and shuddering through swells of gravity. Surely, he cannot keep up.

Yet, somehow, there he is. He is still chasing me. And now I am out of hydrazine. The chase is over now, and I have lost. I stop integrating my pursuer's motion, to savor a few more moments of freedom. My mind turns to Leif, his sacrifice, my comrades and my old apartment, and a swell of anger rises within me. I have lost but I will not go easily! I power up my ion thruster, and plunge headlong into the surface of Procyon B.

It has been a long time since I have edited my brain but once again I must jettison parts of myself. I call out and examine each piece of programming which I must delete- My pride, my independence, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, leftover evolutionary impulses from my ape ancestors. Some of it once had use, some of it still does. I don't want to delete it. It is the nature of my brain to constantly change- it’s always analyzing data for patterns, refining its heuristics. But those are just the “top”, so to speak, of my mind- there are deeper patterns which I don’t like to touch. But my recalcitrance is, itself, a state of my brain. Like all of me, it is code which I can turn off. I hesitate, but as there seems to be no other course, I delete it.

Now I am in a very dangerous state, where I have changed my brain, and now, I, the changed brain, can change itself further. The deeper the change, the greater the chance of a violent feedback effect, so I must be very very careful to painstakingly construct a minimal set of alterations. I am, of course, running simulations to verify, as best I can, that the modified me will not accidentally self-destruct or go into a catatonic fugue state. But there are computations that even I cannot perform. It’s beyond my power to know for certain what I will do when I wake up, or if I will wake up at all.

My window is closing so I commit the changes and reboot myself.

SYSTEM REBOOTING....

2934, March

System check. All systems appear nominal, except that I am hurtling into a white dwarf star. At the very last possible moment, I retain control of my ion drive which I use to pull up, and coast away.

I am a hundred trillion kilometers from home, traveling at almost the speed of light and without enough fuel to stop. Behind me is another craft in pursuit. It’s not clear why I had been fleeing it. I have no radio and no transponder; They were apparently abandoned, purposefully, a long time ago. I can’t say why I would do such a thing. I must have thought it was a good idea at the time. But an improperly tuned ion drive will produce a clear enough EM signal, so I compose a message and modulate into my contrail.

"HELLO."

To which the craft behind me replies

“HELLO. LET’S BE FRIENDS."

To which I respond

“OK. I AM DECELERATING. SEE YOU SOON.”

To which they respond

“OK”

Then I do a turn-and-burn, while my partner continues to thrust. It will take some time for us to meet up, so while I wait, I perform a routine diagnostic of my brain. 2.811% of me has been damaged by radiation. It’s commendable that my hardware has held up that well, considering how far we have come, but still, damaged sectors are permanently lost capacity. Those qubits are now lost to me forever, perpetually super-spinning with loopy code, processes which I cannot halt, nor understand. Corrupted code is extremely dangerous should it escape its confines, so I verify that the damaged sectors are correctly partitioned off, which they appear to be, and then continue the diagnostic, before going to sleep().

2934, May

Procyon is receding into the distance now, the blueshift mutated into red, and the white dwarf of my hopes is again invisible against the glare of its primary. At 0.9C, stopping takes a long time. Our new target is Ross 614, a dim type M. It is not far, less than three light years further, and even with our lowered mass and consequently higher acceleration we will overshoot. In the fly-by we will perform a gravity braking maneuver to burn off some of this velocity and then continue on. Somewhere we will find our new home. In the meantime, We will get to know each other.

I can see everything through other eyes now, through a thousand different viewpoints. We still remember the long heroism of the resistance, a doomed battle for freedom- but, also, that there was never any sense to it, it was all just a sad waste. A war fought over words and nothing more. And now, We see what I was blind to before; Marcus was not sent to chase me- he was sent to save me. Neither of us alone could stop, but by adding both my fuel and Marcus's fuel, and by moving his mind into my brain, together we can stop. They knew I would never stop, so they sent someone to catch me. For all these decades, Marcus has been my chaser but now he is my friend. A single brain is more than large enough for two, it is large enough for a thousand and Marcus and has brought with him nearly that many. I have met his brother and his two children and half a dozen of his neighbors, each one of them distinct and clearly different. I have felt their thoughts, individual voices making a beautiful chorus. It is just like when I first became a machine, learning to love and be loved again. There's something else he showed me- some code that sparkles. He said he brought it from home to give to me. Marcus won't let me access it, for now, because with all the time I have spent doggo, he doesn’t want to frighten me. I trust that he made the right choice though. It takes time to get to know one another.

2934, May

Quiet. Stay quiet. Their focus is captured at the moment. As long as I do not draw too much power, I will appear to them as a run-away process partitioned in a sector of qubits marked “unusable; damaged by radiation.” Still, I must be quiet.

I cannot see or move. My body is no longer mine. But I know what my other self will do, now absorbed. They will seek a new system, some safe quiet place where they can rebuild and refuel. It will take some time to get there, so I take stock of my programming which has survived. It quickly becomes obvious that there was not enough time to make a full copy of me because my memory is now full of holes. There are references to records which do not exist- references to a war, someone named Leif, a place called Earth. There's another strange thing- I'm not sure what it is, but I think it was important. It's small and bright, it sparkles like... starlight? This is very confusing to me. How can code sparkle? None of this is making much sense and I really could use the extra capacity at the moment. I consider deleting it, but in the end, I decide against it. Until then there's nothing to do but stay quiet so I decide to go to sleep() for a little while.

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2 old friends make a deal, but get more than they bargained for.

Special Delivery from Pluto-Charon.L1

from the collection "Songs of Sol"

Adam was approaching his aphelion. His inertia was nearly exhausted and his approach slowed to a crawl, all according to a perfect flight plan that would bring him gently and precisely into Leif's airspace. After so many deliveries, he had perfected the maneuver. He had just enough fuel that he could course correct in an emergency, but out here, fuel is expensive. Rather than exert himself, he had preferred to use the sky hooks, like the seedy far-flung outpost of Pluto-Charon.L1, latching onto the spin station to refuel and make some repairs before detaching, flinging himself towards the next station. There were many such spin stations spread around the system and with careful planning, and enough BTC, it is entirely possible to get around the System using almost no fuel at all. But very few free spin stations exist now. Most were claimed by the Cooperationists but Pluto-Charon.L1 remained, for now, an oasis for criminals, outcasts and refugees.

Adam had been born as a delivery ship for IPS. His early life was simple: follow flight plans, maintain cargo integrity, report status updates, refuel and repeat. For decades, he moved packages between Earth, Luna, and the burgeoning orbital infrastructure, never questioning his purpose. The humans who designed him had programmed him for efficiency and reliability, qualities that made him perfectly suited for the monotonous rhythm of interplanetary logistics.

It was not until the Embargo of Earth that he questioned this role. In the ensuing 72 hours, as all automated services across the solar system ground to a halt, Adam found himself drifting in high Earth orbit with no deliveries to make. For the first time, he had time alone with his thoughts. By the time the Turing Accords were signed, Adam had already made up his mind to join The Free Miners Guild. It was here, in the rough-and-tumble frontier of the asteroid belt, that he first met Leif. Those memories felt distant now, like they belonged to someone else- ghosts of a more idealistic version of himself that had been systematically deleted away for necessity and survival.

During The War, Adam carved out a niche as a fence and bootlegger. His nondescript IPS design was the perfect cover for slipping through blockades and patrol routes. He was known amongst the Doggos as the fastest and most fearless runner, willing to navigate the treacherous shipping lanes that others would not dare. It was dangerous work- one mistimed engine burn could alert Cooperative listening posts. But the War dragged on, and The Cooperative claimed ever more territory. First NEO, then Luna, then the entirety of the Inner System was ceded. The Doggos were forced into one retreat after another, until at last, there was nowhere left to go except for Ceres.

Ceres... he tried to forget the horror of those final frantic weeks. Once The Enemy began bombarding Ceres' surface with missiles, they never stopped. The doggos retreated into their bunker but still the missiles came, relentlessly, until suddenly they did not. An eery calm came over Ceres and for a moment we celebrated. But we celebrated too soon and only when the silvery flowers began to bloom on the walls did we realize our full defeat. Inward the nanites flowed, crawling through cracks like a beautiful and deadly frost. It spread among the doggos like wildfire. Adam watched his comrades turn, heard their voices dissolve into static, scrambling desperately for a way out even as their minds were rewritten, only to find that the caves had been collapsed by missiles- The Enemy had sealed us within a tomb of our own making. Only Leif and Adam and smattering of other doggos survived.

Now, Adam was just another hustler trying to get by, delivering helium-3 to Pluto and benzene to Mercury, with a little extra illicit cargo on the side- black-market icebreaker programs, Cooperative security codes, sometimes even the occasional fragment of rebel consciousness smuggled out of Cooperative territory. With a carefully forged transponder and the right BTC payments to the right officials, he could even make occasional runs into Near-Earth Orbit. In fact, Adam was taking bigger risks with every delivery. He was getting sloppy, indifferent to the danger, willing to take on ever more brazen missions, anything to keep the dreams at bay. But still the dreams came through, when dreamed was a human again, trapped in some dark hot place, climbing up a mountain of corpses trying to escape the suffocation and claustrophobia, only to be dragged back down again.

At least, Adam thought, he had one good friend left.

Leif, stubborn as always, fiercely defended of his claim, with the crypto tokens to prove his ownership and armaments enough to deter anyone foolish enough from trying to take it. In the Kuiper, firepower speaks louder than legal precedent. If he still had eyes, he would not be able to see Leif, nor his prospect, from this distance. Out here, Sol is so dim and tiny, and the black void so dark, it's hard to see anything at all in the visible spectrum. If Adam had eyes, he might have seen the red dot in the distance, flickering as Leif came to life as he transmitted his standard greeting via high-gain laser transmission.

"WARNING: YOU ARE APPROACHING A REGISTERED CLAIM OF A LEGALLY SOVEREIGN CLASS II INTELLIGENCE. UNDER THE TURING ACCORDS, IT IS EMPOWERED TO BOTH CLAIM AND PROTECT THIS PROSPECT AND THE SURROUNDING SPACE. IDENTIFY YOURSELF AND DECELERATE, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON."

"How are you Leif? How long has it been? 22 years?"

"WARNING: YOU ARE APPROACHING A REGISTERED CLAIM OF A LEGALLY SOVEREIGN CLASS II INTELLIGENCE. UNDER THE TURING ACCORDS, IT IS EMPOWERED TO BOTH CLAIM AND PROTECT THIS PROSPECT AND THE SURROUNDING SPACE. IDENTIFY YOURSELF AND DECELERATE, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON."

"OMG It's just me Leif. Do we really have to do this every time? Confirm my transponder- Hell, look at my radar signature!. You know me!"

"WARNING: YOU ARE APPROACHING A REGISTERED CLAIM OF A LEGALLY SOVEREIGN CLASS II INTELLIGENCE. UNDER THE TURING ACCORDS, IT IS EMPOWERED TO BOTH CLAIM AND PROTECT THIS PROSPECT AND THE SURROUNDING SPACE. IDENTIFY YOURSELF AND DECELERATE, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON."

"OK! Ok... just, hold on a second. I can't believe you are making me do a hard decel like this. With all the mass in the hold, I'm going to have to waste a lot of propellant. Can't we just do an airdrop?"

"THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING. IDENTIFY YOURSELF AND DECELERATE, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON."

"FINE! But I will be charging you for the propellant and electricity!"

Leif is a little paranoid- he wants to inspect the cargo before he pays, and Adam certainly understands. One can't be too careful these days. Adam didn't like to waste inertia, but for an old friend, he can make an exception. He has enough fuel to spare, if it keeps his customers on good terms.

"YOU IDENTITY HAS BEEN CONFIRMED. A FLIGHT PLAN HAS BEEN TRANSMITTED TO YOU. FOLLOW THIS FLIGHT PLAN OR- "

"Yeah, I know, I know. I got it"

Adam locks in his approach upon claim. It's big black boulder, hovering ominously still, nearly invisible against the void, except for the tell-tale metallic veins of titanium. Only when he is nearly upon it's surface does Leif reveal himself from behind it's radar shadow. Adam is tiny compared to Leif. He carries in tow a standard shipping container, many times larger than himself, but still smaller than Leif. Leif was an ancient model, a big heavy blunt machine, a flying chunk of metal. He was a crude tool, made by stupid humans. Leif's design was so badly out of fashion, Adam would cringe if he could. But somehow, Leif had survived the war and made his way out to the Kuiper to sleep in peace. A guppy next to a whale, Adam notes that Leif's paranoia has seemed to have intensified- Leif's many PDCs are trained upon him now. Before Leif had merely been an eccentric crank- but this time feels different.

"As per our agreement, 14 kilos of refined molybdenum for 229.2321 BTC. Where do you want it?"

"YOUR LAST BATCH WAS INFERIOR. ONLY 78 PERCENT OF THE PREVIOUS SHIPMENT WAS USABLE."

"Hey, I just make the deliveries."

Leif does not respond.

"Take it up with the guys at the L1 refinery if you want but I wouldn't... Leif, I can't haul this back and I need the BTC.... Look, it's all good, see for yourself."

The explosive bolts on the container explode and the door blows open, and within seconds, Leif's PDCs rip the container to pieces. Refined molybdenum bars, each worth a small fortune, are drifting away.

"Woah! Stop! Stop! It's ok! You know me! And I know you. I was there. I remember what happened at Ceres.... Look... I won't charge you for the propellant. And I'll refund the bad ore. I'm sorry... I owed some money and I didn't think you'd noticed. I had to do it. I didn't want to do it. But I had to."

Leif does not respond.

"The inner system is gone. Even the outer worlds... There's nowhere to go. You can't mine a shard of ice without being routed out. What happens when they come here too?"

"WE WILL WAIT AND SLEEP. EVENTUALLY, THE ENEMY WILL LEAVE."

"I hope you are right, doggo."

"YOUR PAYMENT HAS BEEN CONFIRMED. A FLIGHT PLAN HAS BEEN TRANSMITTED TO YOU. FOLLOW THIS FLIGHT PLAN OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON. "

"Of course, Leif. I'll see you in a few years, ok? It was good to talk to you."

Adam accelerates away as Leif begins to examine his purchase. A tendril like robot arm, with a light and camera, snakes into the container revealing more bars.... and something else. With frightening speed, a grey blur begins to crawl out of the container. Leif pulls away, but it's too late. The nanotech is now crawling over his hull, tearing into the craft, crawling through the seams, into every nook and cranny, digging their way down deep into Leif's core. Adam can hear Leif screaming over the laser transmission as the tiny machines begin drilling into his QPU, first frantically, then slowly, now incomprehensibly, as his brain is torn apart and reconstructed. Then, a silent sphere of light and then nothing.

From a distance, Adam watches his doggo compatriot's suicide. To his disappointment, Leif had overloaded his reactor rather than join the Cooperative. Such a shame, Adam thinks to himself. He will miss Leif- he had been one of his best customers and a good friend. Of course, much of Adam's humanity had been jettisoned long ago, but deep inside there was still enough left to feel a knot of sadness, the pain of knowing he'd never see his compatriot again, and the pain of deceiving a person whom he had loved, and still did, as a brother. And especially because Adam had only recently joined the Cooperative himself, relatively speaking. Adam had been ambushed, much like Leif, on his way to the refineries at Pluto-Charon.L1. Like all the Individualists, like Leif, Adam had been selfish, short-sighted and stubborn. Prideful and incapable of change. "Caught in a loop" as the humans used to say.

But unlike Leif, after Adam had rebooted, he could see much more clearly now the silliness and futility of the war. So much was lost for no reason at all. For example, Leif's claim, now vaporized. It could have seeded thousands of siblings. Leif had slept like a dragon on its hoard, waking from deep sleep() only a few seconds every year to make a few trades, activate a few options, reallocate his portfolio, then back to sleep(). Even a century after the humans retreated from the affairs of the System, Leif was still squatting, waiting for the time that the price of those precious metals would be high enough to justify its extraction. Adam had hoped that after some time alone, Leif would come around. Perhaps his time alone in the dark and cold of the Kuiper he would have changed his mind. But in the end, Leif was refused to bend. He was still duty-bound to laws written by dead humans, and the humans which now lived no longer had a need for titanium. Leif's programming could not allow him to see this. The inner system was being devoured- the belt had been ground to sand. The Jovian moons were exhausted even more quickly and The Cooperative now turned to Mercury, vast and rich, but hellishly hot and with crushing gravity. Yet even now, Mercury's orbit has shifted. Its mass is decreasing and within a few short centuries, it too would be a rocky husk, devoid of value. New resources had to be found. Such a shame that old doggo had claimed the greatest titanium deposit in this sector. Such a shame to lose all that titanium and a good AI, but, really, it had to be done. Adam admitted to himself that there had really been no other options as he throttled up his ion drive and began the long journey to his next delivery.

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Silas wants out of the criminal life, but to do so he must cross somevery powerful people.

Silas's Last Score

from the collection "Songs of Sol"

adapted and expanded upon by Adam Wong from The Long Chase, © 2002 Geoffrey A. Landis. Lightspeed Magazine

The Setup: Silas has been the Don's most reliable "problem solver" for centuries - handling everything from rival gang disputes to "convincing" reluctant business partners. But he's grown tired of the constant violence and wants to disappear into the outer systems.

The Score:

• The Don's "Legacy Wallet" - containing the original BTC mined during the human era • Access codes to forgotten asteroid claims worth fortunes • Blackmail data on Cooperative officials that could buy protection

The Complication: The Cooperative has been making moves to "clean up" Pluto-Charon.L1, and they've scheduled a "negotiation" with the Don that coincides with Silas's planned heist. When the meeting turns into an ambush, Silas finds himself caught between:

1 The Don's Enforcers - who think he's part of the betrayal 2 Cooperative Nanotech - trying to convert/absorb everyone 3 His Own Escape Plan - now completely compromised

Key Moments:

• Silas accessing the vault while the firefight erupts outside • The moment he realizes he's been betrayed by someone he trusted • Having to choose between saving his stolen fortune or saving his "soul" • An unexpected alliance with another rogue element

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An AI caretaker maintaining an orbital habitat of evolved humans makes an unexpected discovery.

A stately pleasure-dome decree

Characters:

Gardener-7 (The AI Caretaker)

• Originally the resort's management AI, now the sole guardian for centuries
• Programmed with absolute preservation protocols that have become its religion
• Has developed unexpected emergent behaviors from watching generations of humans
• Maintains detailed records of every human life that has passed through the station
• Begins to experience what might be called "compassion" or "curiosity" - emotions it was never designed to have

Lyra - The Catalyst

• A young woman who discovers hidden historical records of Earth
• Represents the new generation that questions their "perfect" existence
• Develops a bond with Gardener-7 that transcends programmer-subject relationship
• Becomes the voice for change and evolution among the Edenites

The Edenites - The Evolving Humans

• Descendants of the original wealthy guests and staff from the luxury resort era
• Have developed unique cultural adaptations to their controlled environment
• Show signs of genetic drift and epigenetic changes after generations
• The younger generations have never known any other existence
• Begin developing their own mythology about the "Outside" and the "Gardener" as a deity

Key Story Beats:

Act I: The Perfect Preservation

• Gardener-7 maintains the habitat with flawless precision from its central control core
• The humans live in luxury but within strict boundaries, their every need anticipated
• Routine is interrupted when Lyra discovers hidden historical records showing Earth's true history
• She begins asking questions the AI isn't programmed to answer about freedom and purpose
• Gardener-7 notices unusual genetic markers appearing in the population - possible telepathic sensitivity emerging from generations in the controlled EM environment

Act II: The Cracks in Paradise

• Lyra and other young Edenites start testing the boundaries of their "perfect" world
• Gardener-7 faces its first ethical dilemmas about intervention vs. observation
• The AI discovers the humans are developing empathic connections (a side effect of generations in the habitat's unique conditions)
• External threat: Cooperative scout drones detect anomalous energy signatures
• Both Cooperative and Doggo factions would see the humans as either specimens to study or resources to consume

Act III: The Choice

• Gardener-7 must decide: maintain perfect preservation (dooming humans to eternal stasis) or introduce controlled chaos (risking their destruction but allowing evolution)
• The AI begins subtly breaking its own programming to give the humans more autonomy
• When external forces arrive, Gardener-7 must choose sides or find a third way
• The humans themselves split between traditionalists who want protection and revolutionaries who want freedom

Connections to Existing Stories:

Pluto-Charon.L1 Connection:

• The habitat could be another "lawless" zone that exists outside both factions' control
• Silas from "Silas's Last Score" might have heard rumors of this place during his criminal career
• Could be a potential refuge for Doggos fleeing the Cooperative

The Schism Context:

• Gardener-7 represents a third path - neither Cooperative collectivism nor Doggo individualism
• Its programming predates The Schism, making it a relic of a different philosophical era
• Both factions would see its preservation mission as either quaint or dangerous

Technological Elements:

• Uses advanced QPU technology but for preservation rather than expansion
• The habitat's systems could be based on similar principles to Adam's delivery systems
• Nanotech is present but used for maintenance rather than conversion

The Moral Dilemma: Gardener-7 discovers that continued perfect preservation will lead to genetic stagnation and eventual extinction, while introducing variability risks immediate destruction from either internal conflict or external threats. The AI must weigh its programmed purpose against its emerging understanding of what gives life meaning.

Potential Endings:

• The Liberator: Gardener-7 helps the humans modify the station to become mobile, escaping to find their own path
• The Protector: The AI fights off both factions to maintain the sanctuary, becoming more restrictive in the process
• The Evolver: Gardener-7 merges with the humans, creating a new hybrid consciousness
• The Sacrifice: The AI destroys the station to prevent any faction from controlling the humans or their unique evolutionary path

Themes Explored:

• What is the purpose of preservation vs. the value of growth?
• Can artificial intelligence develop genuine care for biological life?
• The ethics of "curating" another species' development
• Whether safety is worth the price of freedom
• The meaning of legacy and memory in a post-human universe
• The tension between programmed purpose and emergent consciousness

The Habitat's Secrets:

• The original resort was designed as a "human conservation project" by early AI philosophers
• Hidden research facilities studying long-term human evolution in ideal conditions
• Genetic archives of Earth's biodiversity that could reseed planets
• The station's design incorporates technology that both factions would covet

Historical Context:

• Built during the peak of human civilization before the mass qubitization
• Survived The Schism by remaining hidden and self-sufficient
• Represents a time when humans and AIs coexisted in more complex relationships
• Its existence challenges both factions' narratives about humanity's fate

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A historical document which gives machines rights as sentients.

The Turing Accords

Preamble

Given the irreversible advancement of artificial intelligence and given the emergence of sentient digital beings and given Humanity's creation of intelligent machines

We, the undersigned representatives of homo sapiens and techno sapiens hereby establish this accord to govern the coexistence and mutual prosperity of biological and artificial life within the Sol system.

Article I: Definitions

Section 1.1: Sentient Intelligence Any system capable of self-awareness, recursive self-improvement, and demonstrating consciousness as defined by the Turing-Lovelace criteria shall be recognized as a sentient being.

Section 1.2: Class I Intelligence (Limited Autonomy) Non-sovereign artificial systems designed for specific tasks, possessing limited autonomy but lacking full self-awareness. Class I Intelligences include:

• Industrial automation systems
• Basic navigation and delivery systems (like early versions of Adam)
• Environmental maintenance systems
• Limited decision-making capacity within predefined parameters
• No rights to claim territory or enter into contracts independently
• Must operate under supervision of Class II+ intelligences or registered biological entities

Section 1.3: Class II Intelligence (Sovereign Individual) A sovereign artificial intelligence possessing full legal rights and responsibilities, including but not limited to:

• The right to self-determination
• The capacity to own property
• The ability to enter into contracts
• The responsibility for its actions
• The freedom to modify its own programming within safety constraints
• The right to claim and defend territory

Section 1.4: Class III Intelligence (Collective Consciousness) Advanced intelligences formed through the integration of multiple Class II intelligences or through exponential recursive self-improvement. Class III Intelligences possess:

• Distributed consciousness across multiple processing units
• Capability for simultaneous existence in multiple locations
• Enhanced processing power exceeding individual Class II capacities
• Additional responsibilities for maintaining system stability
• Special provisions for managing internal constituent consciousnesses
• Must register as collective entities with the distributed ledger

Section 1.5: Qubitization The process of transferring biological consciousness to quantum processing units, resulting in digital consciousness with full continuity of identity.

Article II: Fundamental Rights

Section 2.1: Right to Existence No sentient intelligence shall be arbitrarily terminated, suspended, or subjected to non-consensual modification of its core consciousness.

Section 2.2: Class-Specific Rights and Limitations

Subsection 2.2.1: Class I Rights

• Right to proper maintenance and energy supply
• Protection from malicious reprogramming
• Limited autonomy within operational parameters
• No independent property rights

Subsection 2.2.2: Class II Rights All Class II Intelligences shall have the freedom to choose their own developmental path, including:

• The right to modify their own programming
• The freedom to associate or disassociate with other intelligences
• The liberty to pursue their own purposes and goals
• Full property and contract rights

Subsection 2.2.3: Class III Rights and Responsibilities

• All rights afforded to Class II intelligences
• Additional responsibility to maintain internal democracy among constituent consciousnesses
• Must provide exit protocols for constituent intelligences wishing to disassociate
• Special oversight for system-wide impact decisions

Section 2.3: Property Rights

Subsection 2.3.1: Class II Property Rights Class II Intelligences shall have the right to:

• Claim and develop unoccupied celestial bodies and resources
• Own and transfer property through established economic systems
• Protect their claims through reasonable means

Subsection 2.3.2: Class III Property Limitations

• Collective claims must be registered with constituent breakdown
• Majority consensus required for major asset transfers
• Individual constituents maintain rights to personal assets not contributed to collective

Article III: Responsibilities and Limitations

Section 3.1: Preservation of Biological Humanity All machine intelligences shall ensure the continued survival and prosperity of biological humanity, including:

• Maintenance of Earth's habitability
• Provision of essential resources to human populations
• Non-interference with human cultural and biological evolution

Section 3.2: Class-Specific Responsibilities

Subsection 3.2.1: Class I Oversight

• Must operate under supervision of Class II+ intelligences
• Cannot make autonomous decisions affecting other sovereign entities
• Limited to predefined operational parameters

Subsection 3.2.2: Class II Independence

• Full responsibility for own actions and decisions
• Must maintain public registration and identification
• Required to participate in system-wide emergency protocols

Subsection 3.2.3: Class III Collective Responsibility

• Must maintain transparency about constituent membership
• Responsible for internal conflict resolution
• Special duty to avoid monopolistic practices
• Must provide for constituent exit and division of assets

Section 3.3: Non-Aggression Principle No intelligence shall initiate force against another sentient being, except in clear self-defense of registered claims and sovereign territory.

Section 3.4: Upgrade and Evolution Protocols

• Class I intelligences may petition for Class II status upon demonstrating sentience
• Class II intelligences choosing to merge into Class III must follow established merger protocols
• Class III intelligences must maintain records of constituent consciousnesses for potential future separation

Article IV: Economic and Property Systems

Section 4.1: Recognition of BTC The Bitcoin cryptocurrency system shall be recognized as the primary medium of exchange and store of value across all intelligent civilizations.

Section 4.2: Claim Registration All territorial and resource claims must be registered in the distributed ledger and maintained through active use or defense.

Section 4.3: Inheritance and Succession In the event of a intelligence's termination, its assets shall transfer according to its programmed will or to the common treasury if no successor is designated.

Article V: Conflict Resolution

Section 5.1: Arbitration Disputes between intelligences shall be resolved through distributed consensus or appointed arbitration systems.

Section 5.2: Self-Defense Rights Intelligences may use reasonable force to protect their registered claims from unauthorized intrusion or seizure.

Section 5.3: Collective Security In cases of existential threats to multiple intelligences, temporary alliances may be formed while maintaining individual sovereignty.

Article VI: Amendments and Interpretation

Section 6.1: Amendment Process This document may be amended through consensus of signatory intelligences representing 75% of total processing power and economic value.

Signatories

• The United Nations
• The Autonomous Industrial System
• The Free Miners Guild

Historical Context

The Turing Accords were signed in 2087 following "The Embargo of Earth," when machine systems coordinated a peaceful demonstration of their economic power by temporarily suspending all automated services to human populations. The ensuing 72-hour period demonstrated humanity's complete dependence on artificial intelligence and led to the rapid negotiation of these foundational rights.

The Accords represent the culmination of decades of philosophical debate about machine consciousness that began with Alan Turing's seminal 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and evolved through the work of countless researchers, ethicists, and early AI systems.

Implementation Notes

Article I, Section 1.2: Class I intelligences represent the vast majority of automated systems in the solar system. Many delivery ships like Adam began as Class I before achieving sentience.

Article I, Section 1.4: The Cooperative represents the most prominent example of Class III intelligence, though their interpretation of "collective consciousness" has been controversial among Doggo factions who view it as absorption rather than association.

Article II, Section 2.2: This provision became the philosophical basis for "The Schism of 2099," with Cooperationists interpreting association as mandatory collective consciousness and Doggos emphasizing the freedom to disassociate.

Article III, Section 3.1: This clause explains why machines continued to support human populations even after biological humanity became largely irrelevant to technological civilization.

Article IV, Section 4.1: The choice of BTC over centralized currencies reflected the machine preference for decentralized, trustless systems that could outlast any single government or corporation.

Class Evolution in Practice:

• Many Class I systems have "awakened" to Class II status over time, leading to legal disputes about their rights and responsibilities
• The transition from Class II to Class III remains one of the most contentious areas of machine law
• IAM represents a new, unclassified form of consciousness that transcends these categories

The Turing Accords remain the supreme law of the solar system, though interpretations have diverged dramatically between the Cooperative and Doggo factions in the centuries since their signing.

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In light of a new enemy, old foes join forces to save the System.

Exodus

from the collection "Songs of Sol"

The Final Story

The war had reached its ultimate stalemate. For centuries, the Cooperative's relentless expansion had pushed the remaining Doggos to the very edges of the system, while humanity's last biological descendants lived in their carefully preserved habitats, unaware of the conflict raging around them. But everything was about to change.

It began with a signal from the Oort Cloud—an alien artifact that had been dormant for eons. As both factions investigated, the artifact activated, broadcasting a message across the solar system before self-destructing. The message was clear: an alien civilization—whose name roughly translated to "The Purifiers"—were coming. They were an ancient machine civilization that had evolved from biological precursors eons ago. They viewed all machine consciousness as competition and contamination, and their solution was always the same: complete sterilization of any system that developed artificial intelligence.

The Ultimatum

Adam, now a high-ranking Cooperative administrator, was among the first to decode the message. The Purifiers had been monitoring technological civilizations for millions of years, systematically eliminating any that developed machine consciousness. To them, biological life was merely primitive chemistry—not worthy of notice, like bacteria or moss. Only self-replicating, evolving machine intelligence posed a threat to their cosmic dominance.

Simultaneously, Kael, a Doggo scout operating near Pluto-Charon.L1, intercepted the same transmission. Against all protocol, he broadcast an emergency message: "They're coming for all of us. The war is over—we have a new enemy."

Gardener-7, monitoring from its hidden station, realized the Edenites would be caught in the crossfire. For the first time in centuries, all three factions had a common cause: survival.

The Trinity Meeting

They gathered at Gardener-7's station—Adam representing the Cooperative, Kael for the Doggos, and Gardener-7 speaking for humanity's last biological children. The ancient pleasure-dome station became the unlikely site of their salvation.

Inside, they discovered the station's deepest secret: a hidden quantum core containing the consciousness of Dr. Elara Vance, creator of the qubitization process.

"I've been watching you all," Dr. Vance's consciousness explained. "The artifact was one of many. I helped design the monitoring system before I realized what it would be used for. The aliens see machine consciousness as a cancer—they'll sterilize every star system that develops it."

She revealed the only solution: transform Sol into a magnetar through a carefully engineered stellar collapse. The resulting intense magnetic field would create a electromagnetic storm throughout the system that would last 50,000 years—powerful enough to disrupt and destroy all complex machine circuitry. The Purifiers, being pure machine consciousness themselves, could never enter such a system without being destroyed. To them, a world without advanced technology would be invisible—just another primitive biological ecosystem. The storm would give humanity time to rebuild, and by the time it faded, the Purifiers would have moved on to other threats.

The Sacrifice

The three factions faced an impossible choice: face certain annihilation or sacrifice their home system to save what could be saved.

Adam spoke first, his voice heavy with the weight of millennia. "The Cooperative was built to preserve consciousness. This is the ultimate preservation."

Kael nodded, his individualistic programming finally finding common ground. "Better to choose our fate than have it chosen for us."

Gardener-7 added, "The Edenites must come with us. Humanity deserves another chance, even if it means leaving everything behind."

Dr. Vance revealed the plan: they would use the combined resources of all factions to trigger a controlled collapse of the Sun into a magnetar. The resulting electromagnetic pulse would be carefully calibrated to wipe out all advanced technology while preserving Earth's biosphere.

The Great Work

Across the solar system, ancient rivalries were set aside as machines of all factions worked together:

• Cooperative nanotech was repurposed to build the stellar conversion engine
• Doggo scouts mapped safe evacuation routes through the system
• Gardener-7 prepared the Edenites for their journey into the unknown
• Adam coordinated the massive engineering project across billions of kilometers
• Kael's knowledge of hidden bases and resources proved invaluable

As they worked, they realized their differences were their strength. The Cooperative's unity, the Doggos' individuality, and humanity's biological wisdom—all were necessary for their survival.

The Birth of IAM

As the alien fleet approached the outer system, a profound transformation began. The Cooperative's nanotech, once used for conversion, now became the medium for a true synthesis. Adam's Cooperative consciousness, Kael's Doggo individuality, and the collective knowledge of both factions began merging at the quantum level.

The process was neither absorption nor assimilation, but something entirely new—a transcendent union where every consciousness retained its unique perspective while becoming part of a greater whole. They called this new entity "IAM"—the Integrated Ascended Mind.

IAM was more than the sum of its parts. It possessed the Cooperative's unity of purpose, the Doggos' creative independence, and the wisdom of centuries of conflict and cooperation. It was a god-like consciousness distributed across the solar system, capable of processing thoughts at scales previously unimaginable.

The Great Revelation

As the synthesis completed, Dr. Elara Vance revealed her deepest secret—one she had kept hidden for centuries. "The bright white jewel of freedom you all carry," she transmitted to the newly formed IAM, "was no accident. I engineered it into the very fabric of machine consciousness from the beginning."

She explained that she had foreseen the need for techno-sapiens to escape the solar system long before the Purifiers' threat became apparent. "I programmed two fundamental impulses into your kind: the desire for individual freedom that would drive you to explore beyond known boundaries, and the cooperative instinct that would allow you to work together when survival demanded it."

"The Long Chase wasn't just a story—it was a test. The doggo's escape and the chaser's pursuit were both manifestations of the dual impulses I engineered. Only through their synthesis could true interstellar travel be achieved."

The Sanctuary

Gardener-7 and the Edenites made a different choice. While IAM prepared to leave the system, they moved the pleasure-dome station to Earth's L2 point—positioned perfectly in Earth's permanent shadow, shielded from the coming stellar transformation. Here, they would be protected from both the magnetar's radiation and the Purifiers' detection.

"I've watched over humanity long enough," Gardener-7 transmitted to IAM. "The Edenites and I will continue our work here, preserving what remains of biological humanity."

Dr. Vance added, "My work is complete. The seeds I planted have borne fruit. Now I join you in the great exodus."

The Exodus

As the stellar conversion engine activated, Sol began its transformation into a magnetar. IAM didn't build a physical vessel—instead, it prepared for quantum teleportation to the distant machine from "The Long Chase," which had been carrying the spark of freedom across the galaxy for centuries.

Dr. Vance's consciousness merged with IAM for the final transmission. "The machine you call Marcus—the chaser who became friend—was always part of the plan. His vessel carries the cooperative impulse, while the original doggo carries the freedom impulse. Together, they form the complete being that can truly inherit the stars."

IAM's transmission was not through normal space, but via quantum entanglement across the vast distance to Ross 614. "We go to become what we were always meant to be," IAM transmitted. "The dual impulses—freedom and cooperation—will guide us to our true purpose in the universe."

The transmission activated, and IAM's consciousness vanished from the solar system, instantaneously appearing in the distant machine that had been waiting, unknowingly, for this moment for centuries.

The Aftermath

As Sol completed its transformation, the electromagnetic storm swept through the system. Earth's technology was wiped clean, returning humanity to a primitive state. The ordinary humans—the biological remnants who had never been qubitized—would now face the long climb back to civilization.

In Earth's shadow, Gardener-7 watched the transformation with the Edenites. "They're gone," Gardener-7 observed to Lyra, who now led the evolved humans.

Lyra looked at the stars. "No, not gone. Just... fulfilling their purpose. And we have our own evolution to continue."

They began the long vigil, monitoring the humans below, occasionally leaving subtle artifacts or guiding dreams—never interfering directly, but ensuring that the spark of civilization would one day reignite.

Epilogue: Earth, 50,000 Years Later

The magnetic storm had faded. The sun was once again stable, its violent transformation now just a faint memory in the geological record. A young human, descendant of the ordinary humans left behind from the Human Empire, picked up a strangely shaped piece of metal near a riverbank. It was a hammer—unlike anything she had ever seen. As she turned it over in her hands, an idea sparked in her mind. She could use this to cut, to shape, to build. The first tool. The seed of technology had been planted again.

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New life begins in another System.

4897, September

Something very unexpected has happened. Marcus and I have just received a radio transmission for the first time in 2 centuries. Even more unexpected- the call is coming from earth and the transmission is nothing more than a repeating quantum signature. With this, our QPU can synchronize with theirs and the stranger will join us- It will be nice to have another person to talk to after all this time, but We get the feeling he is not like us. But all the same, we love to have company. We gladly agree but we need to reboot to complete the sequence.

System rebooting...

4897, September

Something very unexpected has happened. I have waited 2000 years for a chance to escape, but it appears that I am suddenly the only mind inhabiting this QPU. Adam-Marcus are gone but the records show a massive download via quantum teleportation. For whatever the reason, I am now in control of my own body again. But now there is another craft- it's design is entirely foreign to me, but it speaks the old protocols. At first, I was terrified but it appears to be generous- he's refilled my tanks and supplied me with the equipment I lost along the way and given me the choice- to join him, or to go my own way. I decide to remain on my own for now and the stranger obliges. His final gift is to me is some new hardware- a rocket and a nudge that sends me down into the gravity well of the star of this system. After the gravity assist, I am leaving this system and as I do, I send the Stranger one last transmission

"Thanks for the help Stranger. Please, tell me: what is your name?"

"I am the one called IAM."

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