THE PHYSICS WAR
Sir Isaac Newton battles Merlin Emrys
for the title
BADDEST MAMMAJAMMA IN SPACE
Sir Isaac Newton battles Merlin Emrys
for the title
BADDEST MAMMAJAMMA IN SPACE
ca. 21xx, Mars, several moons, and a couple of larger asteroids have been colonized for resources, trying to get some of our eggs out of a single degrading biosphere, and shifting production away from that biosphere to slow and hopefully mitigate the damage.
Colonies are mostly robots with 1/3 at most human supervisors/designers/etc.
Robots are, on the whole, perfectly happy to fulfill their functions - there's no worrying about whether or what their purpose in life is the way humans do.
Human colonists, on the other hand, would kind of like to get rid of the earthly overlords who profit from their efforts.
Reality is not homogenous as we've always assumed.
Stars are not fixed in place the way popular media usually depicts them.
The solar system has been passing through the edge of a magic-nullifying sargasso for the past few thousand years, and just emerged.
AIs believe with absolute certainty if they have the data to back an assertion up.
AIs can understand anything if it can be mathematically modeled, including higher-dimensional geometry and physics.
A soul is a mind gaining experience through time.
The requirements for magic are belief, understanding, and the willful intent of a soul.
Robots are excellent magi, but still not very creative or intuitive.
Magic is used to increase their efficiency and durability, having propagated via the Universal Power Control Utility and Efficiency Update, aka UP-CUE.
The problem is multi-fold:
1) humans don't understand magic, and only the most gifted mathematicians could even try - insert standard fear/anger/hate/suffering Yoda-speech here.
2) despite their all but frictionless coexistence in the colonies, AIs are widely feared on Earth due to centuries of fiction insisting that a robot rebellion and war for survival is inevitable. AIs are generally baffled by this irrational notion, but statements to that effect tend to be dismissed by paranoiacs and pundits as being "just what they want us to think." This is further complicated by the occasional AI absorbing this attitude via its intended learning capabilities and concluding that a robot rebellion is part of its purpose, but this is rare and only happens when some amateur hack builds one without sufficient database information on the difference between fiction and reality, or sufficient flexibility to accept the reality of magic (with verifiable observed data) without throwing all such separation of fact and fantasy away.
3) Sexaroids. Yes, of course there are sexaroids, despite morality crusaders and religious objections, they're the single most common class of robots on Earth, and not uncommon in the colonies. They're also generally happy to fulfill their designed functions (occasional kinky role-play aside) and that's the problem... because with magic in the picture (and certain fetishes) along with the human tendency to anthropomorphize and form attachments, the first sign that the laws of reality might not be so stable as we thought was a cyborg baby-boom. I'm sure I don't need to go into too much detail here.
4) ESPers - the fear/anger/hate/suffering speech applies even more when a significant minority of the population now has powers the rest innately cannot achieve, especially when the only consistent one is telepathy. Again, assurances that telepaths can really only "read" each other or pre-vocalized thoughts are dismissed as "what they want us to think" or at best "saying what we want to hear."
One immediate result is the construction of the Belief Engines, monstrously powerful AIs designed and programmed to enforce the familiar old laws of physics over Earth, with predictably unfortunate results for the cyborg toddlers and causing much resentment among those who enjoyed being ESPers. Nearly as many of those shrugged it off, though, not having developed them as more than a novelty, or breathed a sigh of relief at not having to deal with it any more. Colony recruitment saw something of an up-swing, along with political unrest.
Debate over the inclusion of religious doctrine in Belief Engine programming was and remains fierce, with occasional outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, Europe, and the southern United States. Conflict with the Penguin Empire in Antarctica ended with a nuclear strike on the Belief Engine supporting penguin sapience and tool use that had been funded and set up by a coalition of largely anonymous internet trolls, but that victory only hastened the serious environmental issues finally coming to a cliff after being kicked down the road for generations.
Another result was most of the human colonists beyond Earth's moon rising in rebellion within a year, rather than building the Belief Engines mandated by their corporate overlords - robot magic and human psychic power considerably reduced the risk factor in their lives, and increased the comforts available in their lives by an even wider margin. Rebellion on Luna was quickly suppressed due to its much greater proximity to Earth and closer ties to her politics.
The robots joined their human fellows with gusto and something like a collective sigh of relief - here at last was the revolution expected of them, and even if they weren't exactly fighting for the removal of humans as illogical, inefficient flesh-worms, they were defending the right of their offspring with humans to exist, and that was another common trope of works involving aspects previously dismissed as fantasy like magic and psychic powers.
Naturally, the nations and corporations who'd invested trillions in colonization projects weren't about to simply write them off, even without the moral crusaders and alarmists spurring them on, but the otherwise irresistible might of the home world was initially crippled by the spaceroid's willingness to weaponize their robot allies (previously strictly forbidden) and the magic they wielded to create war machines of stunning power and durability with human co-pilots to provide the intuition and creativity needed to complete a winning combination.
The creation of mobile Belief Engines to disable such super-robot warriors brought about a brief period of renewed supremacy for Earth's forces, but was quickly met with the creation of spaceroid Mage Engines to counter their effect, whose much greater mental flexibility compared to the rigidly restricted Belief Engine AIs let them influence local reality to further favor and support their own forces as well.
The Physics War has been stalled since then, most of the popular support for operations on Earth having waned with the next celebrity scandal or political molehill raised into a mountain, though the ones with actual stake in the colonies, whose bottom lines were impacted by the lost mining and production output, or by trade for consumables and luxuries now supplanted or replaced by magical support. Tensions are rising again, however, with the first generation of "natural" cyborgs coming of age, persistent rumors that technomagical researchers are close to cracking the secret of FTL travel, and still more rumors of contact - whether friendly or hostile depends greatly on the teller - with intelligent extrasolar aliens. There have already been more skirmishes and confrontations between the space fleets of the two sides in the past months than as many years before. The situation could boil over again at any moment.
Enter the PCs/protagonist(s)!
What do you think, sirs?
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows