What Once Was Lost...

Author's Notes: So I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for a while now during the time I've been working on The Sum Is Greater Than its Parts. It's more or less a Humanity Fuck Yeah! kinda story but with a spin on it that I thought would make it more interesting rather than the usual curbstomp. I will freely admit that I've taken cues from different SciFi books that I've loved over the years. Most notably will be a certain Arthur C. Clarke book. You'll know it when you see it and there's no way in hell that I'd ever be able to say that it was my idea. More of my way of honoring the man's contribution to SciFi. What better way to be remembered than to have inspired generations of writers?

This is an Alternate Universe story, should be obvious from the description though. We'll see how it works out.

But anyway, without further stalling, I present to you my next work in progress! (I don't own Mass Effect, I'd love to but I don't)

Humanity was extinct.

The blue-green world that had given birth the the human race suffered the pain, destruction, and wholesale use of her resources for tens of thousands of years before the Human race died. On the cusp of the most prosperous era the world would ever see, they struck themselves down. The most peculiar fact about the extinction was not the they were extinct. Many had been quoted as saying that was an inevitability. Rather it was how they went extinct. Not in prolonged bouts of fire and blood but rather a sudden twitch of clinical violence and then, the Humans were no more.

At the beginning decades of the twenty first century the combined efforts of millions of people across Earth brought forth advances in technology never before thought possible. Computers and software capable of simulating physical reality at near perfect fidelity heralded a boom of scientific understanding, prosperity, and of course the most constant part of human nature - war. While the violence that humanity had been raised alongside almost extinguished the race and nearly left the Earth a cinder, a solution was found. At once almost the entirety of the human race was modified through the use of nano-scale manipulators, cellbots. Not only removing the physiological markers that brought about widespread human violence but the evidence of the genetic markers for violence was removed from our genome. The human mind had finally excised violence from human nature in a matter of days.

As so many other times in human history however, it was not destined to last. On the edge of a golden age, the last vestige of the human condition reached out and pulled humanity into the halls of extinction with such speed and precision, nothing was left to mark their passing.

The extinction was that of the human physical form and all signs of humanity on Earth. Orchestrated by the lead researcher on the cellbots programming team designed to save humanity, the scientists instead chose his version of transcendence. Using the cellbots, Dr. Keil Travers programed the machines and set them to activate after the originally intended unifying event. His physical form was the first to be uploaded as he prepared his digital world and days later, the rest of humanity in a matter of minutes. 8.7 billion startled humans had moments to register that their world was being dismantled before the controlled replication of the cellbots uploaded their physical forms and then removed all but the ancient ruins of humanity from the Earth.

One week, one terrible week for the human race before the Earth was left, scoured of the trace of its most promising and destructive children. But instead of bearing her children to the stars, the planet bore her children deep in layers of the planet itself. Free from the constraints of the flesh and its limitations, Dr Travers held humanity hostage in a computing substrate miles below the surface. Where the geothermal energy powered the simulation the Doctor ran, undisturbed until another great cycle of the galaxy neared its completion.

What would rise from the Earth would not be humanity, it would be the Uploaded, Transcendent Sapiens.

2018 - The work of the major computing corporations usher a breakthrough in computing, nano-scale computational devices smaller than the nucleus of a human cell. While a misnomer, they were dubbed "Cellbots" by the media and the name stuck. Originally limited in use, the advancement in the material sciences allowed for a single drop of water to house enough of these devices to perform at the equivalent speed and power of a high-end desktop computer of the day.

2021 - The proliferation of cellbots allowed for exponentially greater advances in every field of science. Changes to the human form prompts backlash in the governing bodies of the world and safeguards are (ineffectively) programmed into the technologies to limit "the corruption of the human form". Proponents of the Singularity are outraged.

2024 - An increasingly fluid political and socio-economic world prompts acts of violence and cyber-crime - now seen in the same arena as physical violence due to the level that technology is integrated into human life - to ignite across the globe. With the borders of nations becoming increasingly irrelevant, there is no geographical limit to the violence.

2030 - After almost six years of violence and increasingly useless and antiquated governing bodies, the leading corporation of the day, Google, begins a program with the goal of removing a the violent impulse from humanity. It is dubbed Project Monolith.

2033 - A team of researchers across thousands of corporate locations coordinate their efforts to discover the sequence of genomes and structures in the brain that predispose humans to violence. The lead researcher, Dr. Keil Travers, teams up with a team working towards industrial-scale nanotechnological construction via the cellbots to develop a viable means to 'edit' humanity.

2038 - The goals of Project Monolith are proven to be demonstrably feasible after the doomed Mars One colony is stabilized. A date is set for the widespread deployment around the globe.

2040 - January 1st - Confusion grips the world as 3 meter high, .75 meter wide, and .2 meter thick black Monoliths appear to sprout from the ground across the globe in preparation for the fruition of Project Monolith. A group of hacktivists uncover the reason behind the structures quickly and zero-in on Dr. Travers. Unbeknownst to the project leaders, the group convinces Dr. Travers to change the nanobots. Unbeknownst to the hacktivist group, Dr. Travers has his own plans.

2040 - February 27th - Dr. Travers gambles that the programming he had done was enough to ensure he is uploaded correctly. He is the first uploaded human as the swarm of nanobots replicate using his physical form as raw material. The compiling of his form begins with no set end date.

2040 - February 29th - The Monoliths are deployed, the monoliths disperse throughout the population as a fog and in hours, every human on the planet has come in contact with the Monolith cellbots.

2040 - August 1st - Changes to the cells and minds of every human on the planet is declared complete. The aggression seen in previous generations is declared over and attention is devoted to bettering humanity and the planet with an eye to the stars. Dr. Travers awakens in a simulated world, able to interface at the most basic level with all nanotech, he goes about loading new instructions into the global network of cellbots.

2040 - August 3rd - The Uploading begins as at the prompting of Dr. Travers as the entirety of humanity is uploaded in an afternoon. The process of dismantling the entirety of human structures on the planet begins.

2073 - With the exception of the ancient ruins of the world, all trace of humanity is removed from the face of the planet and the final step in plan is finished. The only evidence on Earth that humanity advanced beyond the iron age exists four to thirteen kilometers below the surface as a computational substrate formed by the nanobots. Dr. Travers sets out after research into every facet of the physical world, no longer being constrained in any way in his virtual world.

2183 - The Council races are attacked by the Reapers, led by the rogue Spectre Saren and his army of Geth. The Mass Relays are rendered inert after the Citadel is overrun by Sovereign. The Cycle begins.

2184 - Most major military attempts against the Reapers are met with destruction as the homeworlds of each race fall. Outlying colonies struggle to maintain basic services.

2186 - 70% of the pre-reaper population is dead or processed by the Reaper armies. The remaining 30% attempt to hide. A last-ditch attempt to run from the Reapers is coordinated. Groups from the Asari, Salarians, Turians, Batarian remnants, and Quarians put together a generational fleet of 40 ships with heavy support from the Migrant Fleet crewed by 12,000 of each race least likely to be indoctrinated. The newly christened Vagrant fleet sets out towards an assumed uninhabited section of space.

2190 - After years of draining resources, static discharge problems, fuel scarcity, and general stress-induced animosity the fleet stumbles upon a system seemingly lacking in Element Zero with no apparent relays in a sane range through FTL. The eight-planet system has an appropriate spread of gas giants and rocky planets. Four of each. After a scan of the system, an uninhabited garden world is discovered and the nearly crippled fleet enters an orbit around the third planet to begin colonization.

Yep, that's it for now. I have another chapter being written but I just want to put this out there since I'm still elbows deep in my first story and I really just want to get this to stop buzzing around in my head. That being said, I'd love for reviews on this if you have suggestions or anything like that. Also, I don't own Google. I just wanted to throw them out there. Though it might be funny to put Google as the group that works hardest to save humanity, after all who's going to Google anything if everyone is dead?