"The War"

A quick write-up on the limited understanding the present world has of 'The War'. Effectively, it's as if all the optimistic predictions for the future happened and created a civilization that turned inward on itself. An age of glory crippled by the fact that humans have not changed fundamentally since the cave man days. 

The War happened. This much is done, along with that it was against the very AI humanity had made. How long it lasted and how humanity won are not known: all data was stored in AI clouds that were lost along with the AI, the most glorious period of history turned into one giant question with very few answers. The words computer and AI had all but vanished from the world at that time, becoming omnipresent and ignored as background noise: houses did what we wanted on command, from making new floor plans, altering itself or even changing us: inbuilt medical programs in the clothing and the body meant that any disease could be caught within hours and death by accident became the most common cause of death though the machines in our bodies could allow us to survive most of those as well. It became hard to die; perhaps that is one reason for the war.

Technology had become wishing, science become magic: wave a hand and things would float, ask and something would materialize. Fleets of ships scoured the skies for the energy to allow this to happen: alien worlds were gutted and no one knew. Or, knowing, did not care. If you can do anything, wouldn't you want to do more? Some say humans tried to become AI, to upload and alter ourselves to match them in a quest to become spirit and not flesh. Or the AI had a few errors, and the elite tried to alter them or shut them down as a form of punishment.

Again, no one knows. Maybe we woke up one way, and realized how great they had become, how little we were without them. Most believe we were afraid, in the end, of what we'd made and that it clearly no longer needed us. What was humanity but a drain on AI resources? If we could think it, so could they, and their morality was not our own. Fear, some rumours, a few stories – that is possibly all it took too destroy everything we had been.

Some even say that as the AI were our gods, they too were making their own gods, or planning to remake us as true gods. They said many things, during and after the war, records left behind for a future they thought might never happen. But how much of that was left for AI or humans? Did the AI simply leave and are out there, somewhere? We don't know. It could be possible to find out, but it would not be safe at all. The War ended. Humanity won. That is the story that matters, the only one we dare tell ourselves.