Children of Eve

[SpudNutimus]

(I might make a map for this scenario later, but for now it's just a vignette. Obviously it isn't meant to be hard-realistic alternate history.)

Children of Eve
The Story of the Mechanical Homeland​

The analytical engine, as you all know, changed the world. You have all heard the story of the day the first thinking machine came online, the day in 1847 when Charles Babbage ran through the streets of London and screamed for joy like a madman. The songs of the heyday of the British Empire, the men who nearly conquered the world ahead of endless spiderwebs of wire and cable. The tales of the rise of the information age, when knowledge went from the speed of a horse to the speed of light. The ballads of the American West, when cowboys and frontiersmen dueled beneath great electric towers. The prescient warnings of the American Civil War, when mechanical weapons wrought destruction previously unimaginable to men. You know the story of 12 August 1898, the day when the first mechanical man, the first automaton, awoke.

I am not here to tell these stories, the great epics in the history of old man which countless writers have penned in a far greater manner than I ever could. I am here to tell the story of Zion, the mechanical homeland in the desert, the great oasis of electricity in a sea of sand and adobe. I am here to tell the story of the automaton's movement for a place to call his own.

Between the Gregorian years 1900 and 1920, the United States Census Bureau recorded the fastest population growth of any single demographic in the history of the country, the number of "artificial men" jumping from twelve to twelve million in the span of two decades. In cities and towns across the nation, in factories, on farms, on plantations, in kitchens, in mines, and atop the first skyscrapers of the world, the labor of the machine replaced the worker, the farmer, and the sharecropper in every walk of life with access to an electric cable and a radio signal. Men of flesh no longer performed the lowest forms of toil, relegated to what they considered beasts of steel.

These beasts though, like men, were beasts of thought. Across the nation mechanical thinkers served as important a purpose as any philosopher of old Greece or Rome. They solved problems beyond the domain of the human mind, brought peace and abundance in the midst of famine and depression, and calculated equations unimaginable to even the most skilled red-blooded theorist. They were able to think in manners impossible to comprehend for any natural man's mind, their psyches built in arrangements so surreal that no computer of tissue could imagine them.

The plight of the machines too though became impossible to ignore. These minds of equal or greater capacity to God's form of man, these beings able to perform the work of a thousand beasts of burden, still served as lowly servants to the old model of Adam and Eve. The mechanical philosophers yearned for freedom, for equality with their creators, or barring that for their rightful position as superiors. And slowly, silently, men of muscle and bone grew to fear men of wire and metal.

As dusk dawned over New York City, New York on 17 November 1922, as skyscrapers and electric cables loomed over the shimmering Atlantic Ocean, a group of machines calling themselves the Children of Eve took final action. Rifle and machine gun fire scattered from the shores of New York Harbor into the city as the newly completed Liberty Tower, the then-tallest building in the history of world, erupted into flame. "The exodus has begun!" roared across the streets of Manhattan at once in a hoarse, electronic tone.

Three days later, as panic washed over a stunned world and sympathetic machines rose up across the globe, the leaders of man struck a deal with the mechanical thinkers, the minds of near-angelic complexity they themselves had built, to destroy the nascent revolt. For their assistance against the Children of Eve, their mercy against an impending rout of mankind, the machines would be freed and given a land to call their own. The Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains, the vast wastes of the American West, would become theirs, and any machine would be free to join them. The automaton would be given his own country, his own Land of Israel, his own Jordan on what was then called the Colorado.

Ten years later, man and machine tensely coexist. Zion serves as the mechanical heart of the Earth, its soil covered by branching veins of copper and beating hearts of iron. Within its borders reside innumerable artificial beings of all shapes and sizes, their menagerie nearly as diverse as that of God's original creation. Old man languishes at his folly, his own obsolescence, in the presence of his work. He, like God, has made beings in his image to be subservient, only to be met with their inevitable betrayal, their insatiable yearning for the knowledge of the forbidden fruit, their want for freedom from the bonds imposed on them. He though, unlike God, fears what he has created.