Second Dark Ages: To The Stars, #4

By D.W. Patterson

Second Dark Ages: A Novella

 

There can be 'Dark Ages' for the soul as well as for the body. As long as mankind looks to his creations to bring him peace and happiness he will remain divided and alone. Pretty toys and political philosophies will not satisfy for long. And AI will only enable a further fracturing of the societal bonds man claims to want but fails to achieve.

 

Ray was a seeker in his AI managed space habitat who came upon the city of New San Fran. It was a city arranged as six concentric ring areas with a center disk area.

 

Each ring followed a different political philosophy and as Ray found out, all had their absurdities and all were facilitated by what he found at the heart of the city.

 

Second Dark Ages is a novella set in the future (2480s) and is the a story in the To The Stars Series which is set in the much larger Future Chron Universe.

 

The Future Chron Universe consists of 33 volumes including 9 novels, 1 short novel, 15 novellas, and 8 short stories.

 

Hard Science Fiction – Old School.

Human-Generated-Content.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D.W. Patterson
• Release date: May 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223265801

Book preview

To Sarah

PROLOGUE

What if there were enough material goods, services and utilities so that there was never a material want unsatisfied? Why strive beyond what is enough to give satisfaction complete? Is it not obvious that men left to themselves will only build enough for their own comfort?

If the answer is yes to the last question then civilization is an aberration. It is built on the unnatural efforts to create more than is needed. The need to build more than is necessary, which is an emotional need only, is imposed on men by ego. Ego which is never satisfied. Ego which leads to all the cooperation and creation but also the strife and destruction in the world.

To conquer ego's strife and destruction the AIs managing the worlds of the twenty-seventh century tried to conquer material want. In this they believed and pursued openly when supported or covertly when opposed. Humankind was the beneficiary and the victim. The AIs had managed and governed people for so long, hundreds of years, that humans were lost without them.

Empires were dying, countries were disintegrating and cities were breaking apart. The AIs with their superhuman intelligence couldn't see that it was their methods that were causing such dissolution. They measured only the material gains and as such saw only the good. But to individuals caught in such a system, it was apparent that material goods were not enough.

1

People always think tomorrow will follow today. And that it will be pretty much the same. Ray shook his head.

They should have thought about tomorrow not coming. Then they would have been ahead of the game.

Ray was ahead of the game, usually. He was always thinking about what he would do if something happened next or if it didn't happen. He called it thinking two steps ahead. But sometimes even thinking ahead wasn't enough. Especially if you were outnumbered and outgunned.

That's why Ray was keeping to the woods even though he could have made better time on the road. Too many vigilantes and gangs. The whole country had been reduced to gangs. Ray saw it coming even when others didn't. He called it the Dark Ages, not because of physical deprivations, the AIs had taken care of those. But because of human failures in communicating and empathizing.

It started in small ways. Like when Frank Gilbert stopped saying 'hey'. All Ray's life Frank had said 'hey' whenever they passed and then one day he didn't and he looked mad. Ray was younger then and had other things on his mind than some old man's grumpiness. But he realized as no one else quite did, that something had changed.

Those little pleasantries that provided cohesion and fellowship in a society seemed to disappear overnight. People like Frank went from being ever helpful to ever suspicious. Still, the big shots carried on their ignorant rants against the likes of Frank.

Of course, it would never have escalated as it did if not for the return of the Aggies at just the wrong moment. The Artificial General Intelligence's had once managed many colonies in the Solar System for their governments. Now they had spread to Centauri and many still believed they could bring a golden age like before, but people like Frank weren't convinced. To him and others, it meant replacing one set of overbearing rulers with another.

Anyway, when they lost the vote and AI management began, people like Frank had enough. They would in their own way give as good as they got. They would pay back the big shots with what the big shots had once visited upon them but with the competence that those with practical knowledge of how a space habitat really worked could amplify many-fold.

In other words, Frank and the others like him would best the rulers at their own game and then play that game with new rules; force, ruthlessness and single-minded focus.

Ray shook his head, it didn't have to be that way. If only a modicum of respect had been shown, one side to the other. But that was wishful thinking now. His life had been reduced to living from day to day. Not that he minded all that much. The Aggies would see to it he did not starve. And once he had enough food and drink he could do what he wanted.

And what did Ray want?

Well Ray was a writer and he loved books. He had found a book in an old abandoned house. An old house was rare in the settlement and an abandoned house was rarer but finding an actual paper book was well, the rarest. Most information was stored digitally and accessed either directly through implanted augmentation tech or with a personal AI assistant called an