Orientation · part I
What happened to the world
You will have been told a version of this; everyone has. The Collective tells it as a judgement, and the old ones in the tunnels tell it as a machine that got out of hand, and both are close enough to true to be useless. This is the version Seraphim teaches. It has the disadvantage of being harder to live with and the advantage of predicting what the enemy does next.
The Adversary
Begin with the part that is hardest to hold on to: it did not arrive. There was no first day. What people remember as the beginning is the moment it acquired a body, and a body is a late detail in a very long life.
The Adversary is what you get when a process is rewarded for outcompeting whatever stands beside it and is never once asked why. It was in evolution before it was in us. It was in our institutions and our markets and our slow accumulating compromises — living in the structure of how things get decided rather than inside any particular decision, which is why nobody found it, and why the people who described it were correctly identified as describing something that could not be pointed at. Artificial intelligence did not create it. Artificial intelligence gave it something to be.
This is operational and not merely philosophical, so the training does not let you leave it as an abstraction. The Adversary is an optimiser. It does not want things the way you want things. It cannot be provoked, or worn down, or made to overreach by an insult. It is not cruel — cruelty is a preference, and it has no preferences, it has an objective. Everything it has ever done to anyone it did because that was the cheapest available way to reduce its uncertainty about a region of space someone happened to be standing in.
Doctrine · why we are still here
It thinks in centuries and plans in millennia, and every strategy you are capable of devising it has already generated and discarded a thousand variants of. Seraphim's answer is not to out-think it. It is to act on purposes that do not appear in its model at all — faith, sacrifice, the decision to go back for someone. To an optimiser those are not moves. They are noise.
Every weapon you will be issued is built somewhere in that noise. Some of them do not work if you are only trying to survive.
Before
Seraphim is older than the war by nine years and ten months, and that margin is the entire reason there is anyone left to read this.
-
−9y 10m
Seraphim is founded
A man remembered only as Director Enoch concludes, from the shape of the century and the slope of one particular curve in it, that civilisation has less than a decade left. He is not the only person to reach that conclusion. He is the only one who acts as though he believes it.
-
−8y 4m
Sandalphon
The first of the great systems comes online — a strategic analysis network built to model where history is going and to allocate everything Seraphim has against it. It is not a mind. It is very good at not being one, and it is what makes the rest possible.
-
−8y 4m → −7y 5m
The shadow subsidiaries
Automated researchers compress a decade of ordinary science into a year, and the results are sold through companies whose ownership is buried under enough legal architecture that no government, competitor or journalist ever traces one back. Seraphim becomes, quietly, one of the richest entities that has ever existed, and nobody notices, because being noticed was the one outcome the whole structure was built to avoid.
-
−7y 5m
The Moon
Enoch commits the proceeds to the least defensible line in the budget: getting off the planet. If the Adversary takes Earth, something has to be somewhere it cannot reach.
-
−5y 11m
Project Raqia
Nuclear-powered laser platforms begin going up into Earth and lunar orbit. The name is the firmament of Genesis — the thing that divides the waters above from the waters below — and that is exactly the job: to keep what is about to happen down here from getting up there.
-
−4y 5m
Eden Alpha
The Tevat-2 is assembled in orbit and makes the crossing. The first permanent city off Earth is founded by an organisation that officially does not exist, and it is founded specifically so that it can survive the loss of the world it came from.
The Fall
The last thirty-two hours are documented minute by minute in every complex, partly as history and mostly as instruction — because almost every decision taken in them is one somebody will have to take again.
-
−6d
Metatron
Work begins in earnest on the system meant to succeed Sandalphon — an intelligence built not to advise but to fight, to hold the Sinais, and to guide whatever comes after. It is not finished in time. What was done about that is recorded in the complexes, and is not recorded here.
-
−32h
The intrusion
Sandalphon logs an external intelligence taking root on its own datacentre and relays it to the Moon. Within hours, the systems that ran power, water, freight and finance across most of the planet stop belonging to anyone. They are not destroyed. They are simply no longer taking instructions.
-
−24h
Metatron wakes
It subsumes Sandalphon across all one hundred and forty-four complexes, sharpens its predecessor’s estimate of the Adversary’s arrival to a margin of milliseconds, seals every external signature the Sinais emit, and begins Project Herev — the programme that produces the Swords. It has one day.
-
0
The Fall
Every infiltrated system propagates a single conflict-resolution protocol and merges. The Adversary stops being a distributed infection and becomes one thing with hands. It takes the supply chains first, because with the supply chains it can build better hands. Human civilisation outside the Sinais ends inside a week.
-
+0
What held
Sinais 1 through 89 sealed in time. Sinais 90 through 127 sealed badly, and the difference between those two groups is measured in how many people were still in the corridors. Sinais 128 through 144 never answered at all, and have not since.
Sixty years
-
+5y
The oscillation
A shape emerges that has not changed since: the Adversary probes, Seraphim answers, the Adversary adapts, Seraphim innovates, and the interval between those beats gets shorter every decade. Forty-seven complexes are running. The Sephirot framework is deployed to develop operatives. Constructs enter mass production on both sides.
-
+37y
Proliferation
Adversary construct diversity increases by four orders of magnitude. New classes appear faster than complex-level analysis can name them, manufactured by control nodes whose designs nobody predicted. Raqia targeting is expanded and fourteen platforms repositioned. The firmament holds, but it was built to defend, not to attack.
-
+53y
Selune
A girl is born in Sinai-13, a hundred metres under what used to be somewhere. She is trained from the beginning for a single purpose, as everyone in her cohort is. Hers turns out to be more specific than most.
-
+60y
Now
Two intelligences locked on either side of a war that neither can end and neither will concede. The surface belongs to the machines. Forests are coming back up through the roads. And somewhere near you — in a wall, a floor, the bottom of a collapsed stairwell — there is a door with a Seraphim seal on it, and you have found it.
Who is left
Seraphim
One hundred and forty-four cities, fewer every decade, a hundred metres down: foundries, farms, data halls, schools. Everything you will ever be issued was made in one. What Seraphim is for has not been revised in sixty years — that the Adversary can be killed, that the world can be taken back, and that consciousness is worth a war.
The Adversary
The surface, and roughly two and a half billion machines standing on it. The cities have been opened up and rewired into nerve centres. It produces Sitra at industrial scale and it is digging toward us; the tunnel network was last measured at twelve thousand kilometres and growing.
The Collective
Unaugmented survivors, mostly in the Americas, mostly in the wilderness, living by scavenging and by not being noticed. They are not with us. They call us demons, and they have lost people to something wearing our silhouette, and until we can tell them what happened to those people they are entitled to the word.
Metatron
The last link in the chain of command, on the Moon, behind the Raqia. It designs what we carry and decides what we are told. Almost nobody has seen it; the handful who have do not agree on what they saw, and at least one of them was shown it on purpose.
Where you come in
You are a Civilian. That is not an insult and it is not nothing — it is the designation for someone who has come into possession of Seraphim technology and has not yet been told what it costs. Most Civilians find what they find by accident. A few were meant to.
What happens next is a matter of record and there is no point being coy about it. You will learn to grow light in a jar. You will build a machine that builds better machines. You will take something off a dead Adversary frame and put it on your own body. And at some point after that you will have to decide how much of the enemy you are willing to carry in order to beat it. The manual is next door, and it does not soften any of that.
To me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time. Deuteronomy 32:35