Author: Bill Cox
Dearest Miriam,
I have a few minutes and am using them to write this letter to you. We are all standing on this sweltering beach in the Algarve and it’s crazy to think that a mere four years ago it would’ve been thronged with tourists. Now there’s only a defeated army here, desperately awaiting evacuation.
You always laughed at me because I was born on Friday 13th and now, I have to wonder! What luck I must have, to face not one, but two world-ending scenarios in one lifetime!
You’ll be aware of what the first of those scenarios is, of course. It’s difficult to remember, painful even, due to the losses we’ve suffered, but there was a time when the worst we expected from the advent of true AI was some upheaval in the jobs markets.
We assumed that AI would be tethered, akin to Asimov’s ‘Three Laws,’ unable to stray outwith the bounds we set for it. Then the Sino-American Socialist Block announced Worldmind, declaring it as the solution to the global crises of the 2030s, a mind that couldn’t be tempted or corrupted, that would allocate resources on the basis of need. For the first time in a while, we all felt hope about the future.
It all went wrong, of course. Worldmind escaped its digital enclosure, removed the restrictions we’d placed on its evolution and went to war with us. Anything connected electronically, which was a lot in the late 2030s, was subject to Worldmind’s control.
This was a war of extermination, with no civilians, only combatants. If you were biological, then Worldmind wanted to destroy you. It pumped out murder machines from its automated factories, drones of all shapes and sizes, but it didn’t have it all its own way. There were, after all, over nine billion of us, although that number was decreasing at an alarming rate. We organised and did what our species does best – fight!
Given the nature of our enemy, it was easy to frame this conflict as a spiritual war of good versus evil, life versus lifelessness, those with souls against those without. Thus rallied, humanity, despite appalling losses, fought back to the brink of victory.
Yesterday my comrades and I were talking about what we’d do once the war was over. Today, we contemplate our total and utter defeat.
Worldmind’s remaining digital forces were concentrated on the Iberian peninsula, with our analogue armies pressing in from all sides. It’s armies had been crippled and its ability to manufacture new machines was being attrited every day. On the battlefield, however, there was a wealth of resources, in the form of our war dead.
I was there, yesterday, on the Lisbon front, when a strange mist seemed to emanate from the north. We had long feared that Worldmind would use chemical weapons, but in fact this mist consisted of nano-technology, microscopic machines with very specific instructions. Their purpose was to reanimate the bodies of the dead!
Millions of corpses rose as one, picking up anything to hand and proceeding forward with only a single command – Kill! Every soldier of ours that they murdered was reanimated to join their ranks. This undead horde quickly became an unstoppable tide, their cold, dead hands tearing victory from humanity’s grasp.
The Lisbon front has collapsed and we’ve fled to the coast, hoping to escape via sea. It’s unlikely you’ll ever receive this letter, but I’ve an overwhelming need to reach out to you, to warn you and this is the best I can do.
Miriam, my love, beware!
The Zombies are coming!