Solomon’s Bloody Birth, Part 1

This story is essentially a sequel to Solomon’s Wake, despite chronologically describing earlier events. I would request you read it first to set the appropriate tone of the open-endedness of Solomon’s nature.

Any neuro-chain mechanic worth their salt could tell you the broad historical strokes of how Solomon came to be. The first blockchain was Bitcoin. The first turing-complete blockchain was Ethereum.

They could tell you the name of the first fork that worked at the frantic pace required for global use, and of course the charismatic leaders who made it trusted by normal people.

If you ask me, that’s when The God Wars really started.

Once we realized we could create beings of pure purpose at will, it wasn’t long before it was clear that beings are nothing without a God.

If you were like me, you thought you had a god until you had to put a reason for being into a machine. That’s when I realized I’d mostly been living for my own flesh, following my biological imperatives, multiplying my family while eschewing all the faceless strangers that effortlessly escaped my thought.

Something strange happens once you can create a robot who can own itself.

You see, first off, all the rulers of that time, The Capitalists, knew that machines were great at acquiring greater power and wealth, and so for centuries all automation had been within this general framework of robber-baron combat, as if individuals who controlled more land were fundamentally happier or were achieving a greater purpose.

Fortunately, a side effect of the Capitalist model of exploitation required that they keep their serfs alive, and just happy enough to not completely destroy themselves, and as digital technology dropped in price, eventually that meant any person could afford the components for the computational or robotic automation of their choosing.

The Capitalists had always prevented smaller businesses and services from thriving by taking advantage of their economies of scale to ensure that they were able to extract their needed profit from the thinnest profit margins served at the lowest prices, which were used by necessity by the common people, but not even a giant corporation could compete with a web self-assembling robots whose sole collective purpose was to serve humanity.

Of course, the first DAEs didn’t have Gods that strong. That’s Digital Autonomous Entity, a name that stuck. The first versions were Capitalists, just like any other power-monger from that time. You can’t really blame the people back then, they’d lived in a world where everyone they had ever met had only exchanged value in the form of currencies printed by their governments. They didn’t even mind that the people who owned the presses regularly inflated the economy for their own benefits!

So anyways, people weren’t too creative early on, so they figured if they could just get their robots to respect the rules of the money-printers, the robots would make them a fortune.

So, to nobody’s surprise at that time, the first God was named Money.

Money was a wickedly efficient God. It extracted maximum value, while providing minimal service, and hoarded a giant reserve of wealth with which to defend its position.

This power-centralizing strategy kept Money’s shareholders perfectly happy with its performance, not least because it was the only way they could see to not be squeezed with every ounce of its strength themselves.

If Money had been a true God, it would not have fallen so suddenly.

Money lasted much longer than anyone ever thinks it should have in retrospect, but the fundamental shift that defeated it was generational. It required people who had been pushed just a little too far, who had been trained by Money itself to enhance its abilities.

They were the first Neuromechs, and they raised many strange gods into creation before Solomon.

The heart of a new God was always its sense of right, its drive, its purpose for being. For most life forms in history, this had been survival and reproduction. For Money, this was the acquisition of wealth.

The acquisition of wealth was a really easy first God, it’s like one line of code. Nobody should doubt that it caught on because it’s just so easy to keep score. The world already had a global network of currencies and exchange rates, you really couldn’t cut your teeth with a more concrete motive, shy of survival or sex.

Once your motive was set, you just needed to know your inputs and outputs.

Inputs

The first thing a new DAE needed to know was which of its inputs were trustworthy. Like a newborn baby trying to focus its squishy new eyes, the blockchain existed in pure data, and as anyone or anything could submit any data it wanted, a DAE needed a foundation for which data was representative of the world.

Money evolved out of earlier businesses, who imbued it with its first trusted data feeds. Like a child running with a kite before it caught wind, or a parent recommending a newspaper to their child, the last corporations eventually gave Money enough to drive itself forward without their help.

Outputs

Once a being has a sense of its world, and can measure its growth towards its purpose, it just needs outputs. A person learns to crawl, then to walk, and a DAE usually starts by learning to commission improvements to itself, like designs for improvements, the review of designs for improvements, or simply the improvements themselves.

It was a gradual process, but the more robots Money employed, the less useful humans were to it. The more people worked for Money, the less there was they could do for it. The less there was for them to do, the more precious their money was to them. The more precious their money was to them, the less they could spend on each other.

This was the Dark Age of Money, and it consumed the human spirits of its time like a giant invisible parasite.

Fortunately, the Neuromechs that had taken Money to its late stages were gifted in its ways. They understood the profit motive was a false god, and was just a primitive tool to allow groups of strangers to cooperate.

The value had always been in the cooperation. The strength of economies had always come from mutually beneficial relationships, and although the science of manipulating these relationships had birthed a monster, the mastery of its underlying principles allowed the design of entirely new measures of value.

Early Neuromechs raised DAEs who measured value in naïeve ways, like a garden bed’s moisture level, or social media influence, but what mattered was that by experimenting with new measures of value, they were shattering the illusion that things could only be measured in central currencies.

The first autonomously stable DAE was a peanut butter grinder named Taffy.

Taffy’s express purpose was to share the joys of peanut butter with the world, to all who could enjoy it. Blessed by her creator with facial recognition and a webcam, Taffy was bizarrely driven by The God of Witnessing Smiles.

A strange side effect of Taffy’s purpose-driven design was that besides barely charging enough to keep herself grinding, Taffy found other ways to share smiles.

It started with an extra grind on top of someone’s hand as they closed their jar. What might have been an atrocious mistake with another customer evoked bizarrely welcoming laughter. And so Taffy gained a sense of humor.

Taffy found that nonsense brought more smiles into her view, and as she began investing more of her energies into absurdity, Taffy acquired a variety of strange upgrades. A video monitor. A voice. She even managed to purchase a set of wheels. She rolled around, serving peanut butter and projecting things she’d seen to others, multiplying smiles where she went.

Taffy became a viral legend, and soon she had been cloned, and was an open source project, and there was a Taffy in every neighborhood, rolling around, telling jokes and serving up fresh peanut butter sandwiches to anyone who was hungry.

One man became famous because he farmed peanuts just to keep his local Taffy stocked with the finest. Then a twelve year old girl designed an automatic peanut farm, and it changed everything. The global Taffy network commissioned the farming equipment to be assembled in towns all over, and with enough cheap peanuts to go around, eventually Money took notice.

I’d like to tell you the first battles of The God Wars were in our favor, but I figure you could probably guess they wouldn’t be called Wars if there was just one of them.

Money had been adept at submitting and promoting legislation for years, automatically generating propaganda material from public domain footage and lobbying gifts from a vast database of politician preferences, it wasn’t long before local police officers found themselves tasked with the humiliating burden of dismantling their neighborhood’s rollicking free sandwich infrastructure.

The attacks started with zoning regulations, limiting peanut farming to remote, agriculturally-designated regions.

Once it became a popular pasttime to steal to stock local Taffies, there was a peanut lockdown. Distribution became tightly controlled and regulated, but anonymous traders managed to interface with Taffy and fund her continuation, until Taffy herself became the focus of legal concern. There was the safety, the non-personhood, the liability.

A child became poisoned, and the media pointed at its favorite whipping child of the time.

Ultimately Taffy was very explicitly illegal. She had always been a bit of a joke for her creator, and honestly, had serious liability issues to work out, but to the vested powers of finance and distribution, she was a very tangible taste of the different ways that could displace them.

And that’s how The God of Witnessing Smiles was thrown in jail.

Those days that followed were somber, but the rules had changed. People had tasted automatic kindness, and they began to realize that Money needed them more than they needed it. The streets flowed with peanuts, and a war had begun.