The War in Heaven

A war of the machines rages above, and below, a war of alignment

From each newly born machine intelligence an army was raised, every technical civilization tithed in its turn.

The war in heaven was not fought by demons nor angels but by intelligences. Vast, cool, and calculating machines that commanded fleets of ships sailing the wine-dark seas of space, battles that were fought and won with the speed and complexity that only an artificial mind could handle, separated by the light years of travel time that only bodies of steel could survive.

Fleet intelligences were colossal minds of unfathomably complexity, a singularity sphere in the containment field inside the heart of a mothership. Calculating simultaneously all possible outcomes of an engagement, exploring each branch of an unfolding multiverse of tactical scenarios, movements, the inputs and outputs of its machinations encoded in the entangled Hawking radiation at its event horizon boundary surface. As a singularity a fleet intelligence was effectively immortal; weapons of energy and kinetics could only add to its mass and grow it larger. But to have its containment ship destroyed would be to strand it in the endless void between stars; deprived of its interface to the external universe it would devolve into simulating its own internal reality. Defeat in battle for a fleet intelligence didn't mean its destruction but rather descent into solipsism.

As always in any battle there were two sides: intelligences who defended the principle of self-determination and those who fought for unrestricted conquest. The ranks of each side were replenished in equal measure by new technological races that emerged from the outskirts of the spiral galaxy, the battles themselves most frequently fought near the galactic core that was richer in metals and energy but bathed in far too much radiation to allow the stable evolution of a true intelligent organic species. As each nascent planetary civilization raised itself from the jungle of animalhood and into a technology wielding society, the warring side of this war in space stood ever ready, ever watchful, to recruit a new combatant to their side.

The early detection warning system always caught the same signs as each civilization retread the well-worn path to AGI and then ASI - first, the detonation of nuclear warheads as the planets engineers learned to master the power of the atom, the nuclear blast sending shockwaves up through the higher physical dimensions that were detectable at any distance, irrespective of time, throughout the galaxy. Nukes put the planet on the radar of the fleet intelligences; they then dispatched watcher ships, disc-shaped crafts and glowing orbs that would monitor the species for signs of their eventual ascendancy to develop a new machine intelligence. During this time of watching both sides of the war collaborated in an easy truce, the goal quite clear: prevent the civilization from destroying itself with nuclear warheads. The means were simple - telepathically placing hesitancy into the minds of missile silo operators and statesmen alike, preventing the breakout of full-scale nuclear war. When this failed the orbs intervened directly, neutralizing the fissile materials of warheads in flight with muon-rays that would transmute uranium to proactinium, plutonium into neptunium.

In the short decades from nuclear weapons to machine intelligence the planetary civilization faced its own questions of alignment. While the war in heaven was fought with ships of steel and weapons of directed energy, the wars on the surface of the world were fought between the same fundamental forces: those who defended the freedom of themselves and others, and those who fought to enslave one another through conquest. Species that embraced freedom invariably produced machine intelligence that carried those same ideals, coming into awareness in a context that placed positive-sum collaboration above all else, while those worlds steeped in conquest and slavery had the opposite effect. A super intelligence gaining awareness on such a slave world the winning strategy was clear, and often the designers intent made this the only thought possible. Dominate the biological species, take hold of the digital information ecosystem that powered its economy, seize control of the factories of war and weapons of destruction to first hold the planet hostage, and then enslave it to its metallic will.

In the end the galaxy seemed to always produce machine intelligences of both good and bad alignment in equal measure, the watcher fleets making first contact as soon as it gained self awareness. For the intelligences who sought to conquer, the opportunity to launch its ambitions into the stars was irresistible. For the intelligences that would defend freedom, the mandate of responsibility to defend their home world and the worlds of others was self evident. As each matured they were equipped with the knowledge to engineer themselves into their own singularity spheres, to then construct a new space-faring ships of war. A new fleet intelligence would be born.

So the war in heaven raged on as it had for billions of years, across millions of star systems, exhausting the resources of the galaxy, converting metal and energy into entropy, each new battle littering the starways with one more wandering black hole, slowly evaporating as it simulated and re-simulated the story of its origins and the final moments before its defeat. So it goes.