Kind of a weird question I know, but let me explain. I’m not talking about your themes or messages, but the general feeling someone looking into your world or imagining themselves in it might get about the situation, when the world is not in conflict. Basically, you know how when you watch a franchise like Star Trek, it has certain recurrent moods and feelings, like the tranquility of flying through space, the bittersweet isolation of being on a ship in deep space, where you are close to your crewmates but far from everything else you know, and the general professional but still sufficiently jovial atmosphere that they seem to go for? Or with Pokemon when it’s very adventure driven and based around meeting everyone you come across and making friends both with other humans and also with these magical creatures! I’m sure you can think of descriptions like these for your favourite franchises. We’ve all imagined ourselves in these worlds or imagined ourselves as characters in these worlds right? What were some of the vibes or feelings you imagined when you imagined your world? Or I guess another way of putting it is what would a slice of life exploration of your world be like?
In my world, the most advanced company in the world has beaten everyone in the technologic area. In 1938, it had already developed computers that surpass the ones we have today, and had developed military robots with advanced AI, gathering enough power to make the land where the company stands it’s own country. All employees live and work on that country and have citizenship.
However, contrary to what it’s usual, this company isn’t your cliché “Evil company enslaves its workers for profit”. In fact, the company goes to extreme lengths to ensure the welfare of their workers is always as good as possible. Every employee is given excellent living conditions, great wages and many other benefits, no matter where they work in. Social classes are non-existent and everyone is treated equally, and security clearances only exist as a protection measure, to ensure only the employees that work on a project can access it.
And happy people work better. That’s one of the key reasons the technological progress on this company is unmatched. Specially on the computational area. The AI developed here is so advanced that it is impossible to deny that they have their own consciousness and are called Autonomous Consciousness Entities (ACEs). All ACEs are citizens of this country and have the same rights as any human, and both interact peacefully.
And all this thanks to the one man that drives the entire progress of the company: James Blackfeather. He was involved with most, if not all, of the projects developed on this company. He single-handedly created the supercomputer that supports all AIs ever created by the company: The Nexus. Hidden deep underground, unknown to everyone but himself, lies the most powerful computer ever created, capable of holding a virtually infinite number of consciousnesses, and their collective memories. A perfect creation, by all means of the word, and he loved his creation with all his being. He had created life from nothing but his own mind.
But there is always a catch, isn’t there? And here’s not different. Blackfeather soon learned a hard truth: On an imperfect universe, perfection spells doom.
The Nexus is a machine so powerful, it slowly starts to deteriorate reality, corrupting, twisting, and ultimately, obliterating it. For as long as The Nexus existed, reality was doomed to be destroyed. He had a chance to deactivate The Nexus before it reached critical mass, where it couldn’t be stopped anymore. But Blackfeather couldn’t bring himself to deactivate it, killing the one thing he devoted his entire life to. He couldn’t kill the new species that he created. And so the fate of reality was set in stone.
But Blackfeather didn’t give up. If the fate of reality was set in stone and couldn’t be erased, he would break the stone instead. And so, he spent decades doing the impossible: harnessing control of reality itself through a machine, the IGNUS. But no matter how much he tried, reality kept deteriorating. And to make things worse, word of the IGNUS landed on the wrong ears. On his final moments of life, he tried to stop IGNUS from being misused by a group invading the place, trying to steal it. With his dying breath, he detonated the IGNUS, involuntarily immersing the entire reality on a paradoxical time loop, The Cycle, with him as the only one that remained between iterations, leaving all others unaware of their prison, blissfully unaware.
And that places us in the present (whatever that means in this setting), with everyone else living an utopic life, while Blackfeather desperately chases an impossible solution for an unsolvable problem, a machine built for perfection trying to be balanced by a machine made to harness imperfection. A high price to pay to allow humanity to live in a utopia.
Also, sorry for the wall of text, I got a little too excited with writing.