During his war-game, Roran had started up all drones, bombs, and anything else remote-controlled, effectively starting a short world war 3. Luckily, nuclear weapons were out of reach, as ‘Ronan’ was still a young AI and didn’t manage to gain access. Of course, him being a sylph also had a lot to do with it, but not much was understood about the difference between a sylph and a normal AI yet, except that its processing capability was lower for some reason.

Ronan’s disaster cost the lives of about 30 million people, civilians and military personnel alike. It had sent drones to most cities, and bombed all main power stations, without damaging the most important facilities.

Such was the goal of the game, to attack an enemy base, disable the facilities in such a way you can salvage them if you take over the base, and advance afterwards. The game had had incredible detail since it had been made to train soldiers.

And… well… that had been the end of Ronan. He had effectively self-destructed. Shutting down all power, shut himself down as well. Of course this wouldn’t happen in the game itself, and was thus a logic Ronan could not understand, or hadn’t had the time to understand.

All this had happened in less than 2 days, yet it took 2 years to remove Ronan from all servers everywhere, then another year to create a virus that automatically attacked any remains. Only 3 years after that were all power stations fixed. Meanwhile, all research in AI was effectively banned, and a witch-hunt for those still doing it came about.

A lot more were killed during this time, and it took almost 100 years before further research was allowed, and even then, a lot of riots had followed this decision.

It’s now the year 2191, and it’s been 70 years since VR-games have been made available. After the horrible ‘Ronan disaster’, and the following witch-hunt for AI researchers, a lot of work had gone in making a new institution. This institution was known as the AIRA, or the artificial intelligence regulation army, known as the ‘exerminators’ by the gamer-community.

They were an independent governing body that dealt purely with AI’s, or that was their title anyway, but what they really did was exterminate ‘sylph’s’ as soon as they were born, hence the nickname.

This organization led to a lot of controversy, especially in its infancy, when they randomly took down games, ejecting all players, and restarted the whole thing from scratch, with a new AI, of course. Now, however, technology, and the hiring of people who actually knew what they were doing, made it so that they could slow down the time in the game to a crawl, delete and replace the AI, and restore the time to normal, all without any player noticing.

Of course, another group of people, called the SFO, sylph freedom organization, had been created as well, but it was mostly comprised of people who wanted to tell their friends they ‘had a cause’ or that they ‘stood for something’, the rest just did it because fighting the system was ‘cool’ and then there was the 1%, who did it because of moral obligation…

Either way, it was just like people who ‘cared’ about children in Africa in ancient times, but never really did something except for send some money, effectively worsening the situation, as most of it went into the pockets of either oppressive leaders, or incompetent fools who couldn’t manage anything. But hey, they paid five bucks to feel better about themselves, so it was all worth it in the end!

So, except for a few protests, petitions and the like, the SFO did not do anything really. A good thing

though was that most organisations like these had disappeared. With the appearance of AI’s, making everything automated, food and homes were abundant, and people could just take whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, poverty had effectively become a thing of the past.

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Of course, these changes did not go as smoothly as I explain them, the fact that most all jobs disappeared seemingly overnight was followed by a severe backlash. A huge string of depression and suicides, all people who felt like they had no place in the world anymore, this came together with a huge string of new inventions, from normal ones, like d-ears (prostethic ears for the deaf) to stranger ones like coloskin(skin that changed color at will), or the No-To( a body-mod that made it so you no longer had to go to the toilet).

Of course, all this was met with even more changes, the new ‘inventors’ came with a lot of accidents, the suicides with a lot of attention in the news… they tried making jobs available again, but who would want to work and be compared by a robot who did it, not just better, but faster, more efficient, and using less resources?

So, the solution was to restart an old program, VR, which solved most of these problems, the VR called ‘science’ was one amongst the first, where anyone could experiment with anything, with unlimited material, and at no cost.

Money disappeared, replaced by creds, the in-game currency, only usable in games for entertainment. Society no longer had use for money now that everything was free, but still needed a reward for those doing work in all sorts of places. Like the AIRA, airport personnel (a plane might fly itself, but people still wanted to be served by other people). Of course, to be served by other people you needed first-class seats, or VIP entrance if it was in bars and such.

One of the biggest changes though, was that taxes had disappeared, though this seemed like a minor change, this meant that leaders were paid for their efforts, and according to their efforts. A leader now had to earn a minimum amount of credits to maintain his seat of power, making it impossible for them to just sit around pretending to do things while just throwing around flowery promises, all while raking in cash. A leader now had to both work hard enough, be competent enough, and be chosen by election. Making it a half technocracy, half democracy.

This obviously met with a lot of protests, but the UN, now now as WN, world nation, only gave out the AI technology to those countries agreeing to join under their banner, listening to their rules. Unexpectedly, the first to join them were Russia, and the last the US, where people had to wait for the elections to vote for a president that would agree.

Following these changes, the class-system quickly changed, and now the ‘rich’ were those with abundant creds, and it became a status-symbol to have humans work for you. Having robots work for you quickly became ordinary, something anyone had. Which was normal, as they, just like basically anything except for creds and in-game items, were free.

This, was the world of today.

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A.N. hey guys, if you've read up to here, please tell me what you think of my idea, not necessarily through a revieuw (i'm going to write sporadically, so getting a lot of revieuws would be unfair for other readers who hope to find a book that's got a lot of updates) but through comments. any mistakes or strange wordings you find would be great too!

that way i can fix it up and make it better!

thanks to all who read, and even more thanks to all who comment, as this will help me improve!