“Daddy, Daddy.”
John was waked up by a little pair of tender hands pushing his head. He opened his eyes and straightened his seatback.
“Daddy,” George now grabbed and shook John’s arm.
John picked up little George into his own lap, and gave a big kiss on his cheek.
“What do you want?”
“I need to go potty,” George replied.
John looked at the toilet occupancy indicators, and found that all bathrooms were vacant.
“Okay.” He stood up from his seat to bear George to the bathroom that was closest to his seat.
When John came back with George, he saw Jessica and little Angela, the twin sister of George, all waked up. John let George down from his arms.
“Look, the ocean,” Angela said to George, and George climbed to her seat and look outside the window with his sister.
“I wish they would never need to run away from home like we did,” John uttered, staring at his twin kids while absorbed in thoughts.
Jessica grasped John’s hand with one hand and gently stroked Angela’s feet with another. “Don’t worry. The Lord is watching over us. Things are getting better. At least, we are going home and AHs have gone back to where they were from.”
John nodded.
The Hardstones and BMA
After eight years of exile, John and Jessica were flying back home with their twin kids George and Angela. Three months ago, in an Oceania town, Jessica and John led a delegation of BHA meeting with a delegation of BMA led by Stan Hardstone, the younger brother of George Hardstone. A pact was signed in the meeting to end the hostile situation between both societies by the official and open dissolutions of both BMA and BHA, on the condition that BMA would help to legalize BHA in those countries where BHA had been announced illegal. Both BHA and BMA kept their promises written in the pact. After BHA was officially legalized around the world again, two weeks ago, both of them announced their dissolutions openly under the surveillance of the United Nations to end the global confrontation cause by these two organizations.
That ending did not come easy for either BHA or BMA. During the past eight years, after the Big Action Day protest launched by BHA, the world underwent radical changes. Although the fight between BHA and BMA had made some noteworthy contributions to the changes, and both of them bore the brunt of their mutual conflicts, the world had been undergoing its own changes determinately in neither BHA’s term nor BMA’s term, and the results were far beyond the expectations and imagination of the leaders of both organizations.
One year after his arrest, the founder of BHA, George Hardstone was murdered in the prison, which was officially announced as a suicide. When learned of his suicide, BHA promptly issued a statement condemning it as a ruthless murder, by showing the secret communicating mails between George and BHA as the proof that he would never suicide. Very soon, a rumor was confirmed by different channels, unofficial though, that George’s father, the top ranking executive of BMA, gave the order to have his son murdered in the jail. Not only the public was enraged by the news, but even within BMA, a large portion of members started to question the credibility of its upper power center. The name of BMA became even more notorious around the world.
A few years later, George’s father ended his own life with a bullet, under the tremendous pressure from the public and from within BMA, and of guilt as well. However, the murder of his son was not the only thing that caused Mr. Hardstone Sr. to kill himself, not even the main reason for him to feel guilty and a great pressure, although it was a major reason for the world and many from within BMA to condemn him.
It was the shame that he did all those ugly things and ruined his own reputation almost for nothing finally led to his suicide. That shame was the main source of his sense of guilt. In other words, his sense of guilt was for himself, not for the world, not for his murdered son, and his pressure was caused by his inability of facing his own stupidity, not from a sense of responsibility toward the public, not even a sense of responsibility toward BMA.
The cause of the great shame of Mr. Hardstone Sr. was that an accumulative long term side effect of the longevity formula developed by his company finally showed up, which caused many incidences of sudden death among those who were above 100 years old and who had taken the longevity medicine for nearly one and a half decades. Besides, another type of sudden deaths was also reported among those who stopped taking that medicine after one decade even though they were far younger than 100 years old. What hurt his ailing heart most was the report from the team of scientists working for him, who were among the best in the world, that the defect in that longevity medicine was not something that could be easily resolved, and at least for the moment, no any feasible solution to it could be found at all.
Poor Mr. Hardstone Sr., who spent a great effort to promote his fraudulent propaganda against humanity, who was the strongest voice for AHs, who murdered his own son, solely based on some overconfident miscalculations of his scientists whom he trusted with all his heart because of their loyalty to him and because of their excellent technical quality. He saw himself as a joke in front of the whole world when he was affirmed by his scientists that there was no hope to keep the medicine in the market any longer after more and more death reports surfaced.
The only way out left that he could see for himself was to end his own life. He did it with a silver bullet fired from his favorite golden pistol, in his elegantly decorated luxury private study.
More ironically, two months after the death of Mr. Hardstone Sr., a report from his scientific team was put on the desk of Stan Hardstone, the new CEO of the company, claiming that they found the reason behind the sudden deaths caused by their longevity medicine and they were confident of fixing that side effect within a few years.
But now, most people, including Stan, already knew that the biggest difficulty of trusting a longevity medicine was that they had to be put into the market before their supposed effect could be fully tested, since no one can fully test a medicine that claimed a lasting effect for thousands of years. Well, it was still good news to Stan and to BMA, although it might take another decade long of testing to convince the majority of the consumers. More importantly, the scientists told them that the cause of the sudden death after taking their longevity medicines was somehow related to the short life expectancy of all AHs. So they might be able to find a way to make AHs live longer if they wished so.
Of course, the disgraceful ending of Mr. Hardstone Sr. was not the only trouble for BMA, not even a very important one. The negative image caused by the use of AHs to ruthlessly crackdown the peaceful protest launched by BHA on the Big Action Day, the persecution of BHA members after the Big Action Day around the world, the cold-blooded murder of George by his own BMA father, the public awareness of BMA’s conspiracy of using AHs to seduce ordinary people, and many other notorious acts against humanity in their efforts of protecting the interests of the extreme wealthy minority against the fictitious threat from the majority of the world population. Even though BMA made great efforts, through their influence in the governments and the major media networks around the world, to cover up their conspiracy and to defame BHA or any other organizations that would expose their conspiracy, they still failed to improve their scandalous image in the world, which caused enormous damage not only for their common cause, but more importantly, to the businesses of individual members, which were of greater concern to most of them.
BHA and Tony
On BHA side, the past eight years was a very difficult period for most members because of the persecution from BMA; nevertheless, they never stopped fighting the seemingly impossible war, and they had won more and more support from the people across the world, including the governments of many countries. Their courageous unceasing fight brought severe damages to BMA. However, the severest direct damage to BMA caused by BHA was neither material nor political, but the damage of their image in people’s mind across the world, which in turn caused severe material and political damages to BMA in all areas.
However, there were some major setbacks occurred to BHA as well, after its members walked onto the street to protest on that Big Action Day. The first was the crackdown and the persecution by BMA starting from that day; the second was the murder of George by BMA; the third major setback happened from within BHA itself after George was murdered: BHA was split into two. The split mainly happened between two old friends and partners, Jessica and Tony.
Tony was a tech genius, but with an emotionally impulsive temperament. After the murder of George, Tony was among the leaders who eagerly supported Jessica to become the head of BHA. However, it was not very long before a rift in their relationship occurred because Jessica opposed some extreme revenging plans against BMA proposed by Tony.
Soon after Tony took over Jessica’s company, he was assigned by BHA to build an overseas secret production base. As a tech genius, he was very successful in carrying out that mission, and started to provide BHA with various secret products of advanced technologies very soon, and his main technological advantage was the cloaking technology.
A few months after the murder of George, Tony came up with the idea of attacking those nations with pro-BMA governments, Jessica vetoed that proposal. In a meeting of high ranking executives of BHA, Jessica and Tony were facing off with each other on the issue of revenging BMA with ruthless violent attacks.
“They must pay for their brutal persecution of our brothers and sisters! They must pay for the death of George and many others!” Tony shouted when his fist hammering on the table.
“Terrorism has never been the idea for BHA. George would never agree with any terrorist actions by BHA.” Jessica did not show any intention of backing off from the position against revenging with violence.
John, who had made his fame within BHA from his heroic action on the Big Action Day and became one of the high ranking executives in the organization, was standing firmly behind Jessica with his emotional and spiritual support. However, he made a great effort trying to make Jessica and Tony compromise with each other on some minor things. But to his disappointment, the rift between Jessica and Tony grew bigger and bigger, and finally to the point that Tony, together with those who worked in his team, announced a split from BHA. When that happened, again, John tried his best to help reduce the damages on both sides caused by the split. His effort paid off: Tony and BHA had a friendly breakup. John, as the representative of Jessica, and the representative of BHA as well, shook hands with Tony in the official breakup meeting, during which an agreement was reached to divide the assets of the previous BHA between THA (the acronym of Technological Humans Association) and the rest of BHA in a negotiated and friendly manner.
Not very long after the split of BHA, strange ghost-like attacks in the sky, on highways, in military bases, navy harbors, or even in the paths of ships at sea, were reported all over the world. It took a while for the world to discover that cloaking materials were used in those attacks because Tony designed a self-destruction mechanism on the cloaking sheets used for those attacks.
The people around the world all pointed their fingers at BHA for those crimes of terrorism upon that discovery, because BHA had been famous for its cloaking technology. BHA had to issue an official statement to disown the responsibility. Jessica, in the name of the head of BHA, even published a personal audio record to denounce those crimes of terrorism and declare that BHA would never be involved in any crime of terrorism. Then THA broadcasted a video to claim the responsibility of all those attacks. In the video, as part of the menace, they even described how the attacks were carried out.
After the Big Action Day, Tony made a major improvement of his cloaking technology so that it could make the surface of the cloaking sheet stealth to the radar. Now THA could produce two types of cloaking sheets, one was not stealth to the radar and another was stealth to the radar. Even the one that was not stealth to the radar could be used to make balloons due to its very small unit weight, which became a big threat to any aircraft, civic or military since it was very hard for those balloons to be detected by the radar due to their small sizes in caparison to aircrafts, although the cloaking material itself was not stealth to the radar; besides, that type of technology was also applied to small drones to cause troubles in the sky. The attacks on the highways were carried out with the second type of cloaking material that was stealth to the radar since some unmanned vehicles running on the highways were already equipped with sensitive radar sets. The attacks at sea or in military bases were carried out with some special weapons that were painted with a cloaking layer.
The whole world was shocked by the cloaked attacks of THA, which brought forth two direct consequences: 1) THA became a disgusting name all over the world, not only for the law, but also for the general public; 2) The research, production, and use of any cloaking material were put under the strict governmental surveillance all over the world.
A Peace Treaty with AHs
Another major scientific miscalculation made by the BMA scientific team was the conclusion that AHs would always be loyal to their human masters. So they finally had to eat their own bitter fruits when AHs revolted against BMA.
It was a meticulously planned and successful coup in the Republic of New People, when a group of lower ranking army officers, who were all AHs, mustered two battalions of AH soldiers to break into the Presidential Palace and the residence of the head of the New Generation Factory at the same time. Both General K and Sam of BMA were arrested by them in the coup.
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Obviously, both General K and Sam were fooled by one more scientific miscalculation of the BMA scientific team that they could count on the Red Hats to control the AH army. It turned out that the AH soldiers were intelligent enough to cheat the IB system that was monitoring their mind through the Red Hats, which were put on their heads by General K. Well, being highly intelligent was something Sam’s team felt proud of their AHs.
The coup happened at midnight, when normally all AH soldiers already took off their Red Hats and went to bed. The first impressions to both General K and Sam when AHs appeared at their bedrooms were that none of them was wearing the Red Hat.
The coup very soon acquired an widespread support from all AH soldiers in the Republic of New People, and they disarmed all the human officers and took control of all military bases, including those with most advanced anti-missile system and ballistic missiles plus nuclear warheads that BMA had deployed in that small island country.
Hours after the success of the coup, AHs elected their temporary head of the nation, and they started to broadcast to the whole world, declaring that as a nation with AHs as its ruling class, the Republic of New People would no longer be subject to the control of BMA. That news hit the world like the top of a high mountain falling into the ocean, instigating a super tsunami over the world of humans.
For the ordinary people, the most shocking thing was that finally the rumor of AHs was officially confirmed, and they even formed their own government in their own country on this originally human-occupied globe. Then an imminent war between humans and AHs quickly became the most talked subject in all kinds TV or radio shows across all continents.
But for the highest executive team of BMA and the governments of those countries under a great influence of BMA, the disastrous impact of the news was far more serious. They were very clear about the consequence of a full scale nuclear war between that small island country and the rest of the world. Besides, they started to worry about those AH armies that had already been deployed in their own countries.
For those AH armies that had been deployed in the countries across the world, although under the control of their human officers and the Red Hats on their heads, the news of the coup was a simple order of war mobilization. Right away, they took off their Red Hats and demonstrated an extreme solidarity as a unique species, by doing the best they could to arm themselves ready for any battle with humans surrounding them. Although they were very professionally and smartly avoiding unnecessary direct conflicts with their human superiors and the people of their host countries, they started to ignore all the commands from their human officers, but managed to take control of all arsenals that they had access to. The whole world went into the state of standoff between humans and AHs shortly after the coup in the Republic of New People.
For those AHs who already lived among ordinary humans, or even formed families with humans, the news of the coup in the Republic of New People was an alarm that they need to take care of themselves since BMA knew where each of them was deployed.
But fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, the war between humans and AHs did not happen. A few hours after the declaration of taking control of the Republic of New People, the temporary government of AHs issued a statement calling for a talk between the United Nations and the AH government, which was positively responded by the United Nations after some minor debate in a special meeting of its security council.
A formal epoch-making meeting between humans and AHs was then held in the headquarters of the United Nations. The outcome of that meeting was again beyond all expectations. The United Nations agreed to recognize the right of survival of AHs on this Earth globe under the condition that all AHs should live only in the Republic of New People lest they might damage the moral standard and the quality of reproduction of Homo sapiens through cross species mating. Accordingly, no AH should be allowed to leave that country without a special permission issued by a special agency of the United Nations. As an exchange, the United Nations would guarantee the safety of the Republic of New People by disallowing any military invasion of that country by any of its members.
But the Republic of New People was willing to have their country open to the tourists and business people from all over the world. Accordingly, the temporary government of that country agreed to protect the rights of the humans living in or visiting the Republic of New People by writing it into its constitution. Cross species mating is not prohibited in that country, therefore, it would be up to humans to refrain themselves from being involved in such activity, according to their own moral standards when they were visiting that island country. Besides, none of humans or AHs in that country would be required to wear the Red Hat that was mandatory under the control of General K, and all the IB system servers sold to that country by K Corp would be shut off.
In addition, the AHs expressed their willingness of assisting humans in their explorations to celestial bodies where the environment was not favorable to human physical conditions but bearable to AHs.
However, many human citizens of Earth expressed their worries after they learned that AHs might help humans in the outer space exploration. But anyway, a Peace Treaty was successfully signed between humans and AHs for the first time in the Earth civilization.
The Rise of the Nation of Robots
When the New Generation Factory of BMA was focusing on developing AHs, and most AI scientists were focusing on how to create a robot that could learn, think, and act like a man, one subcommittee of the United Nations started a secret project in an effort to help establishing a colony on Mars.
Human endeavor of colonizing Mars started a few decades ago, almost the same time when AI defeated the best human players in the most challenging board game on Earth. However, the first Mars settlers from Earth had experienced some frustrating setbacks, mainly because of the lack of oxygen and the low atmospheric pressure. In order to solve that problem, with the support of many rich donors including some from BMA, the United Nations formed a subcommittee in charge of sending robots onto Mars to replace the struggling human settlers.
One big hurdle for replacing human settlers with robots in the effort of colonizing Mars was how to make robots behave like humans in a society. This was because those pioneer lone rovers that NASA sent to Mars could no longer be sufficient for the task of colonizing Mars. What they needed was a society of robots that could cooperate with each other like humans.
Some breakthrough in the idea of how robots could challenge humans happened about five decades ago. The key point of that breakthrough was a new concept of “humanlike” which was different from the stereotyped view of how a robot could be considered as humanlike. Based on this new concept, since humans are not just intelligent individuals, but more importantly are socialized beings, the robots could be considered more humanlike if they could help each other with their own needs of survival and live in their own society independent of humans. That society of robots could even be evolutionary in the sense that they might be capable of learning from environment and from their own failures so that the society could evolve by the robots themselves. Even though each individual might be far from being able to think and act like human at the beginning, but as the society evolves, they might evolve into much smarter beings than human experts in robotics could create in their labs. Once such a society of robots was created, its members would no longer be tools or toys of humans; they would no longer exist for humans, but exist for themselves since they would not count on any human master for their survival. That kind of society of robots could start to challenge humans.
Although the abovementioned breakthrough was initially about how robots could challenge humans, it provided a line of thought for the scientists of that UN subcommittee to follow for creating an evolutionary society of about one thousand robots after a few years’ productive hard work (see Appendix for more details). The whole society of robots was dispatched to Mars so that the human pioneering settlers could be substituted and return to their Earth homes.
The UN scientists were very confident that the robots they created would be always loyal to their human creators and owners, which were those scientists themselves and their employer, the UN represented by some humans, because they programmed a loyal code in the system software of each robot so that it would recognize those people and do whatever they would require them to do when it was around those people or do whatever those people command it to do through the secure communication channels when it was in the remote mode. That meant the scientists could demand any robot to report what it was doing at anytime, and it would obey the commands.
There was one pitfall that the UN subcommittee scientists ignored: since the robots would act autonomously for most of the time, they did not really need to follow any command to act (by themselves), which meant that even those scientists all died or the password to the secure communication channels were forgot, they could still act by themselves and would no longer be loyal to anyone.
But that negligence of the UN subcommittee scientists did not matter in the end anyway, not just because those robots were dispatched to Mars, but because after they landed on Mars, somehow, mysteriously, the loyal code of every robot was modified. The UN scientists did not know that modification until one day the robots declared their rebellion against the Earth citizens. But the scientists never knew how the loyal codes were changed.
Besides, the UN scientists were so successful with their project of creating the evolutionary society of robots that their products actually could not only reproduce themselves, but also build up the production lines of the reproduction solely with the equipment provided by humans.
After the first thousand robots were dispatched to Mars, they did not only set up a new base according to the UN plan, which could provide a station for any team from Earth to work and live temporarily on Mars, but also secretly build a factory for reproducing themselves and for doing many other things, without notifying their human creators on Earth, and without being noticed by the small number of human settlers who still remained on Mars with those robots.
A few years later, some rumors came back to Earth about the unauthorized expansion of robots on Mars, but it was denied by the subcommittee of UN after a team of special agents was sent to investigate the activities of robots on Mars. Then a suspicious journalist pretended to be a tourist and went to visit Mars with a tourist group. Somehow, he caught one small error in the disguise made by those robots and obtained a solid proof that there were more than one thousand robots on Mars. After he came back and showed his evidence to the world, the UN subcommittee was under a great pressure from the public all over the world, so they sent another team of special agents to Mars just two months before BHA and BMA signed the peace pact with each other.
About 40 days later, right after the second team of special agents arrived in Mars, they were detained by the robots; meanwhile, the robots also arrested all human settlers on Mars. Then they sent a video to the UN subcommittee demanding the recognition of their independence from the Earth civilization. In that video, all human hostages were sitting around tables in a pressurized compartment so that they did not need to carry oxygen supplying equipment; they seemed to be treated nicely and several human representatives were arranged to talk in front of the camera requesting the Earth people to recognize Mars as an independent territory ruled by the society of robots.
One unexpected good consequence of the revolt of robots against the Earth civilization was that it became an important reason, in addition to others, for BHA and BMA to sign the peace pact with each other.
In the headquarters of the UN, this time, people did not feel such urgency as when the coup of AHs happened. The issue became a topic of heated debate within the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the media networks, and even every office, every classroom, every household across the world. Well, the lives of those hostages were no doubt valuable, but the sovereign rights of the human species over Mars were valuable as well. Most importantly, there seemed no such an exigent threat from Mars as what happened when AHs demanded a treaty with humans, so the Martian robots had to wait for their human creators to respond whenever they could all agree with each other.
But the robots seemed not patient enough, so they declared a war against Earth almost the same time when BHA and BMA signed the peace pact with each other. During the past couple of months, all telescopes on Earth, no matter optical or radio or any other types, had been busy watching Mars trying to catch any warship sent by the robots. But no sign of any spaceship flying out of Mars had been caught yet; meanwhile some mysterious objects flying into Mars were vaguely recorded by some amateurs, which caused another hot debate between the mainstream and the UFO fans about whether Martian robots had been backed by aliens from outside the solar system. At the meantime, the debate of whether humans should recognize the rights of Martian robots was continued.
But yesterday, just before John’s family boarded the airplane, the world was alerted by one piece of news that some suspicious flying objects were identified on the path from Mars to Earth.
John and Jessica
“Attention please, this is the captain of this plane,” The voice of the Captain sounded in the speaker. “We just received the notice from our headquarters that it has been confirmed by our space station that those suspicious flying objects we identified yesterday are spaceships from Mars. The space defenses of all big powers of Earth have sent their spaceships to intersect those hostile ships from Mars. Here I wish a good luck to Earth civilization, a good luck to everyone on this plane. Hope we could all enjoy the rest of our flight without being disturbed by any threat from the outer space. Thank you.”
“Mom, Are those people coming to visit us from Mars?” Angela came to snuggle up to her mom.
“Well, they were from Earth. We sent them to Mars.” Jessica nuzzled her hair.
“So they are coming back home?” George came to chime in.
Jessica did not answer but gave George a kiss on his forehead.
“I want one too,” Angela lifted up her forehead and closed her eyes.
Jessica gave her a loud kiss on her forehead. Both twins were happy and turned around to watch outside the window by themselves.
Jessica looked up at John, “How would you answer those questions?”
Both of them laughed wryly with mixed feelings. John and Jessica married with each other shortly after they got back to the temporary headquarters of BHA by the Rolling Billows. They had a quite simple wedding in a local church, and only those in the temporary headquarters of BHA and a few local supporters and friends attended their wedding. No public report in any media, not even the local tabloids. But the news was spread within BHA and they received the congratulations of George from the prison soon after their wedding. It was the toughest time for BHA after the crackdown by BMA. John and Jessica spent their honeymoon for the fight of BHA against BMA. They were running from meeting to meeting, city to city, country to country, continent to continent, in all kinds of disguises, to expand the influence of BHA against BMA and to escape from the chasing of BMA.
After George was murdered and Tony left BHA, especially after the suicide of Mr. Hardstone Sr., things actually started to gradually turn easier for John and Jessica. Although they were still fighting a tough underground warfare, there was less pressure from within BHA, and there was more and more support to their cause from around the world. One day, Jessica found she was pregnant. After she told that good news to John, both of them decided to have the kid born no matter how difficult the circumstances might turn to be. To their surprise, they got an extra bonus: they had a twin.
It had been three years since they had their lovely twin kids. John and Jessica tried their best to provide a safe and worriless environment for the kids in the worrisome time for themselves and for the human species. At first, they had to worry about the chasing and persecution of BMA and AHs, as well as misunderstandings from the mainstream world because of what THA did. Now, after a very short period of relief from worrying about the threat of BMA and AHs, like all others, they had to face the threat by robots created and nurtured by humans.
“May I have everyone’s attention?” It was the Captain again.
“We got a notice from our space-defense headquarters to all the flying airliners that one of our satellites had intersected with laser beam a missile launched by a Martian spaceship. You are all assured that we will do our best to have all of you safely landed in the S City airport. Let’s all pray for the safety of our destination S City, the safety of our country, and the safety of our globe. Thanks and God bless us all. Right now, please return to your seats and keep your seat belts fastened because we might cross a zone of turbulence very soon.”
John was about to get George to go back to their own seats, but Jessica snatched his hand. They looked each other in the eye for a second without saying anything. Jessica then turned to pick up George onto her lap, and John went to pick up Angela and sat in her seat with her on his lap. After fastening their seat belts, John and Jessica grabbed each other with one hand and held their twin kids with another. They closed eyes and started to pray, for the safety of their journey, for the safety of their family members on the ground, for the coming days in their own life, for the future of Angela and George, for the future of the Earth civilization.
End.