Part 2
Over the next few thousand years, the three human factions settled down in their new homes and, as intended, were content and prosperous, at least as their respective ideology reckoned things. The watching Deus Machine noted that their cultures had became somewhat insular and chauvinist with a certain condescending sense of superiority towards the other two factions. However, it was not considered to be a precursor of violent intentions and was even seen as somewhat useful in maintaining the groups' separation and mutual non-interference. Thus, their semi-controlled agents, such as the Praeses, were adjusted to maintain this attitude and guide it towards the most non-violent, paternalistic and separatist of mind-sets.
That said, the Deus Machine had noted something that it had always calculated was inevitable. Simply put, humanity was too complex and the various possible states of any given individual's consciousness too impossibly varied for every individual to fit perfectly and permanently into the current trinary solution. 'Shades of gray' was a very real issue. Transferring extreme deviant individuals and groups to different factions that more closely met their personal ideal was a temporary patch at best and one that only delayed somewhat the ultimate chaotic destabilisation of the system. Either conflict or stagnation leading ultimately to degeneration and collapse were becoming an inevitable outcome.
A fantastically complex non-linear calculation showed that the levels of intervention required to maintain the current status quo would continue to grow geometrically over the coming few human generations to the point where, within a relatively short time (maybe as little as 10,000 years), the complete elimination of free will and possibly even sapience would be the only viable option. This was, for a variety of reasons, completely unacceptable.
No harm...
Thus it was that the child, now a woman of astounding age, became the focus of the Deus Machine's attention once again.
The woman, who had chosen for herself the name Alice Grove (having cast aside the name the scientists gave her as a useless remnant of a dead epoch of human history), had endured the millennia. Her genetically-optimised biology and nanotechnological augmentations had made her functionally immortal. Possessed of a perfect editic memory and a bio-optronic neural net that could store many multiples of the the complete breadth of human knowledge without any significant degradation, she could achieve wonders with only the subtlest of efforts.
The Deus Machine had been fascinated to watch as she attempted to recreate the lost technology of ages past, carefully measuring out the 'red lines' beyond which the nanomachines left on Earth would not let her progress and finding loopholes through which she could circumvent them. They noted with interest her forays into human psychology, of learning how to control others behaviour simply by knowing how they think and providing the right nudges at just the right place and time to direct them in the path she felt best. The huge AI network realised that she was still, consciously or not, keeping faith with her creators. She was trying to find the middle path. Many of her efforts had even been so clearly beneficial to the descendants of the Naturist faction that, through its agents, the Deus Machine had subtly aided her in reaching her goals, ensuring appropriate technological products reached her, disguised as 'humanitarian relief' from the other two factions, that she would be able to reverse-engineer without triggering the vigilant nanomachines.
The very nature of the Deus Machine precluded pride. There was a limit to what they could foreknow and predict, as with any other physical creature and they felt no particular reason to deny this. The progress that Alice had made indicated that there may indeed be options available to resolve the issue of differing human perspectives on the future that they had not previously considered.
Maybe the time had come to, once again, re-open the 'edit window' of the great human equation and undertake large-scale and overt modifications.
No harm...
Firstly, however, the right agents needed to be chosen to avoid 'push-back' from the dangerously stagnant, chauvinistic and increasingly reactionary populations. Additionally, millennia of effective isolation and striving had begun to breed in Alice several degenerative personality disorders that her regenerative augmentations were not able to counter. It was determined that she required something to re-connect her with her shorter-lived brethren.
Two interesting potential vectors for change were quickly noted on one of the space habitats of the Perfectionist faction. The children of a Technologist who had turned his tools to the optimisation of biology and thus had been transferred to the faction that more closely matched his ideals, they were fine examples of what Alice had been created to pursue - the middle path; a merging of the products and attitudes of all three factions to a stable final outcome. All that was needed was to move the world-lines of their three existences into a converging path. Oh, it was certain that, in the short term, this intervention would cause small-scale chaotic outcomes, but the Deus Machine, after tens of millions of simulation runs, was confident that what they had set in motion would harness the increasing deviation from the trinary solution in a way that was non-destructive and may even allow them to come closer to a single-society optimum that they had long ago first attempted to find.
Thus it is that the past becomes the present and the story we have been reading in Alice Grove. The question remaining to be asked is this: Just how perfect is the Deus Machine? Has it really found a solution or, by placing three unpredictable individuals with often-illogical thought processes at the pivot of its new intervention, has it simply begun the undoing of all that it has done?
Poll
