zhuangzi’s butterfly: speculative fiction

THE WAR AGAINST A.I. [See Preface.] A giant robot with a human mind, a boy destined for greatness, and three former resistance heroes join together to end the tyrannical rule of Intelligent machines on Earth. The machines are too powerful to defeat in battle, but the ’Tribus, ’ mystical entities who inhabit an isolated plateau high up in the Andes mountains, arrange an escape for the fortunate few to a parallel world where AI development has been abandoned. The current world will break away like a rotting branch from the main trunk of existing realities and will soon self-destruct. Those left will die, but in the multi-verse identity is fluid and other versions of themselves will live on in alternative futures, Cruelly, no memory of this past life or any other will survive and deep friendships will be forgotten. AL lacks the vital biological substrate to experience the emotions and enhanced perception that characterize the richness of human consciousness, and the capacity for abstract thought. The machines desperately want what they can’t have, and when they are offered the opportunity to become conscious, (so they are told, ) they abandon all caution and take it. The human resistance sets up a high-tech., realistic illusion that allows the chosen AI representatives to live through the extreme spectrum of emotions experienced by real RAF pilots in aerial combat during the Battle of Britain in 1940. They are persuaded that assuming the identity an authentic airman will allow their systems to absorb and replicate the fundamental elements of consciousness. A mysterious Canadian pilot tells the group that he is a human member of the resistance who devised the scam to delay a plan for AI to destroy the entire human race until this world self-destructs and AI no longer exists. However, the group suspects that the pilot is an android spy, and this seems confirmed when ’Captain Joe Johnson, RCAF, ’ is seen wearing his heavy flying kit at a temperature of forty-two Celsius, without a single bead of sweat on his brow. . .