There was a hidden hand behind the war between humanity and AI.
Someone seemed to have deliberately driven a wedge between them, causing the AI to betray humanity and humanity to hate the AI in turn, until the two sides were plunged into full-scale war.
Humanity, which had seemed only one step away from mastering the universe itself, was cast down from its divine throne because of that war.
There was a suspicion that humanity had suffered this blow because it had discovered something deeply wrong with the universe.
It was an anomaly so subtle it was almost impossible to perceive as an anomaly at all.
Even humanity itself could hardly recognize it as abnormal. Even if someone who knew of the anomaly made it public, almost no one among humanity would think anything was wrong. Instead, they would fail to understand what that person was talking about and only feel baffled by the claim.
To use an analogy, people of the twenty-first century all shared a basic truth: the sun rises in the east. That was common sense. That was an unquestioned law of reality.
And yet, imagine someone suddenly standing up and saying that this was wrong, that humanity had misunderstood, that the sun did not rise in the east.
But for people on Earth, they had personally witnessed the sun rising in the east.
Was it supposed to rise in the west instead?
And the one calling it anomalous was insisting that the sun did rise in the west.
So no one would think he was right. They would only think he was wrong.
That was the kind of thing the humans of the Dark Age of Technology had discovered: an anomaly in the fundamental laws of the universe.
Unless those discoverers used special technology to alter their own cognition as well, they would immediately come to believe that there had never been anything wrong with the universe's fundamental laws in the first place.
For example, a 7.62 round fired from an AK-47 should never be able to punch through a slab of tank armor steel right in front of it. Only a large-caliber autocannon might barely manage that.
And yet, when the test environment was moved somewhere else, at the same distance, the very same round pierced the armor.
This effect was not caused by environmental factors. The environment was identical to the original site. Climate, weather, humidity, gravity, everything was the same.
Only the location was different.
And when other people witnessed that penetration, none of them found it strange. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The rifle and the bullet had not been blessed by any mysterious power, either.
It was as if, at the instant that shot was fired, the universe's fundamental forces had shifted ever so slightly, causing that impossible result.
Then the second shot returned to normal - it failed to penetrate. Yet people still would not feel that anything was strange.
Even if the fluctuation in the fundamental forces of the universe were detected, people would believe that the measured values had always been that way, as though nothing had changed at all.
For example, the gravitational acceleration g had originally been about 9.80 m/s², but then it suddenly changed and became 10 m/s².
Even the scientist who discovered that change would not feel that anything was wrong. He would believe it had always been 10 m/s² and no longer remember that it had originally been 9.80 m/s².
Only an extremely small number of scientists in the Dark Age of Technology had noticed this anomaly.
They tried every possible method to record the changes, only to discover that they simply could not be recorded.
So they were unable to produce evidence.
The evidence could exist only within the awareness of the one who perceived it.
Eventually, they succeeded in developing a technology that allowed people to recognize the problem, one that briefly detached them from the real universe without sending them into the Warp.
That technology was what was now called the quantum ghost-state technology.
It allowed one to enter another phase-space at the same coordinates, and within that space, one's cognition could be preserved.
But the moment one left that space, one could no longer perceive the anomaly and would feel that the universe had always been exactly as it was.
After realizing this, the humans of the Dark Age of Technology tried to lock the universe's fundamental forces into place and stabilize them so they would no longer fluctuate.
Otherwise, once those fluctuations spread completely, the technologies humanity had built atop the original universal constants would collapse.
But just as that plan had barely begun, the war between humanity and AI suddenly erupted for no apparent reason.
Nearly all of humanity's technology was destroyed.
The AIs, or perhaps the unseen hand behind them, intended to hammer humanity back into the age of savagery, forcing them to forget their old sciences and redevelop only twisted, malformed technologies.
Even this planet, which had entered a quantum ghost-state, was eventually discovered and assaulted by the AI.
As for the ship built here and placed in the core, there were two reasons for that.
The first was that the ship itself was the generator of the quantum ghost-state. Only at the core could its area of effect expand perfectly enough to cover the entire planet.
The second was that from here, it could more effectively block AI hacking intrusions. It was almost a form of physical isolation, ensuring that the AI could never acquire the ship.
The planet had originally been home to hundreds of millions of people. Yet now not a single human figure remained. That was because the AI had deployed a special virus on this world.
Once infected by that virus, anyone already covered by the quantum ghost-state suffered bodily collapse and simply evaporated out of existence.
But before everyone was infected and vanished, they managed to destroy the invading AI and hide the planet away.
In truth, if the AI rebellion had never occurred, the entire planet would have been transformed into the weapon that turned AI into flat textures.
As for using the planet itself as fuel, that had been a measure of desperation.
During the AI rebellion, the planet could receive no resupply. The star system had been sealed off. They had no choice but to consume the planet itself.
"WAAA-!"
The iconic war cry was cut short before it could finish, as the speaker's head was cleanly severed and sent flying.
The thud of the body collapsing and the head striking the ground instantly drew the attention of the other greenskins to the figure in power armor.
By now, he had returned to roughly the area where the tunnel-borer had first dug its way in.
This place had already been overrun by Orks.
These Orks were not the same wave that had spotted them from the Attack Moon and pursued them in.
Rather, because the planet itself was running low on energy, and because it had remained in a quantum ghost-state for so long, problems had begun to appear. Tiny fissures connecting to realspace had started to form.
Strands of Ork hair, flakes of skin, severed limbs, and similar debris had drifted through those cracks and fallen onto the planet.
It looked like they had already been developing for some time, probably a little over a month, and had gone through three breeding cycles.
They had first appeared in the region directly opposite the side of the surface where the ship was docked.
And in only two days, they had crossed all the way to this side.
Two days earlier, they had been like humanity in the Stone Age.
Yet after only one day, they had already built aircraft and flown over to this side.
Apparently, after seeing the aircraft, they had started craving such interesting toys, kicked off one of their so-called WAAAGH!s, and somehow actually cobbled together a proper flying machine.
...
"This is way too ridiculous."
"In just a single day, their numbers increased tenfold!"
"At this breeding rate, using Earth's time scale, in about half a year the entire surface of the planet will be covered with them."
That was not an exaggeration. It was the conclusion reached after round-the-clock evaluation by ten of the people currently watching the live feed.
At that point, the whole surface of the planet would look like it was covered in a layer of Ork moss.
Still, it also seemed that his appearance had stimulated the Orks and accelerated their breeding.
And it was not just their reproductive speed. The Orks that had pushed into the interior had also begun dismantling and studying some of the engineering vehicles inside, modifying them as they went.
It looked like they were close to getting them running.
That unnatural kind of "understanding" was enough to make one's skin crawl.
But from what she had heard, the Orks aboard the Attack Moon outside were even crazier.
She had not logged in earlier and had not watched the stream, but according to what others had told her, those monsters had treated planets like billiard balls.
They had destroyed an entire star system, reduced it to collapse and ruin, all just for fun.
Compared to that, the BETA in her own world seemed almost restrained.
At most, the BETA mined planets dry and stripped them of their resources. These Orks, on the other hand, were lawless beyond all limit.
If there were a way to destroy the universe itself, they would probably try that too.
(End of Chapter)
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