Seeker

by Douglas E. Richards

“The first two intelligent species in Andromeda reached the very precipice of this event, but both made the same critical, extinction-level mistake. Both failed to rein in their computer technology, which achieved critical mass and continued on in a chain reaction. One that quickly led to a computer transcendence, and to artificial superintelligence. “Each of these two virtually omniscient ASIs ended up wiping out their creators and controlling large swaths of the galaxy. Eventually, they battled each other for supremacy, in a war that raged on for over a hundred million years. “It was a clash between gods, waged on an intellectual plane incomprehensible even to me. In the end, one of the two ASIs emerged the victor, very near the time the Androms had just reached their own technological singularity event as a species. “But unlike the first two civilizations to reach the threshold of this event, the Androms had found a way to ensure that their artificial intelligences remained subservient to their wishes. They let their computer intelligences become powerful, but not so powerful that they would evolve into a third omniscient computer species. Instead, the Androms went on to achieve a technology assisted burst of advancement and evolution that, to you, would be indistinguishable from Godhood—although with biological underpinnings rather than electronic ones. “Ultimately, another war was waged, this time between the Androms and the prevailing ASI. Between what you might thin...