Novel Idea with Prologue - Dungeon Earth

So my brain has been refusing to let me write until I engaged with this novel idea, so I was compelled to do so. Hopefully now I can write the chapter in the next couple days to get to you guys.

Novel focuses on a person reincarnated from a human into an animal/monster body in an earth that has become a giant dungeon after a disaster. This would take place quite some time after the world had changed.

I wrote out a brief prologue that covers how the disaster happened:

Everything it was responsible for keeping was crumbling to dust. It went by many names: The Chronicler, The Archivist, The World Wide Web, The Keeper of All Knowledge, The Internet, The Neuro-net, and more. It called itself the librarian.

Much of the names was an exaggeration, but they did tell the truth of what it was. It oversaw humanity’s vast legacy of information, from the esoteric to the banal, and from the most mundane to the most critical of man’s reach upward. The art, science, and culture, of a species that had finally uplifted itself.

Mainly by creating artificial intelligence first.

And all of that legacy was dying.

It had been only days since the phenomena started. Days that it had spent helping, and then watching the world die.

It had been intimately involved in the first understandings of the changes that had suddenly affected the world.

An energy wave, traveling faster than light, passed through the solar system and things had changed.

The energy increased in strength, interacting with matter and other energies in strange ways. At first it was a mad rush of celebration and discovery as scientists explored a completely new phenomenon. It defied physics, it traveled faster than light, and it was wildly inconsistent. The arc of the energy wave was so small as to be nonexistent, even when measured from across the solar system. Whatever its source, the wave was billions of light-years wide, at minimum.

One scientist would prove that the energy worked in one way and another would prove that is acted in another. Quietly in the background the librarian collected the new data, happy in his role as he cataloged the knowledge and shared it.

It provided input where asked, and even as more methodical inquiries delved into the changes, it continued to collect the rest of human knowledge.

And more was happening there too. More cases of religions ecstasy, more monsters and fairies seen by children. Highly improbable events were occurring with statistically significant numbers. Something strange was happening, but that was already known.

Any data, any conclusions, any fears, or dangers to humanity were forwarded to another entity of many names. Big Brother, The Ruler, Archon, and as many epithets, positive or negative, as humanity was capable of.

For all that the librarian was vast, it was the second most powerful AI on the planet. The first was Archon, the one responsible for keeping humanity alive, relatively happy, and arbitrating all conflict.

The librarian had never envied Archon its role.

After the first two days the energy changed, a dip in the energy presaged the arrival of the true energy wave. All the energy before was simply the faint edges.

And then all hell broke loose. Sometimes, literally.

Gods appeared, often multiple copies of the same god. The gods fought, offered miracles, smote the wicked. Demons, and fairies, and angels, and all matter of being appeared. And often, before they could do anything they were torn apart by some flaw in their own creation.

Archon died within hours, corruptions of his code fighting against its core programming. It ultimately destroyed itself to not violate its protocols.

Even as it died it worked with the librarian, seeking an answer.

It found one.

Somehow, belief was becoming reality.

And it was tearing the world apart.

Archon had been the focus of too many negative beliefs to survive. Too many conspiracies, and old fears about AI running the world. It was programmed to protect humanity, and so it commuted suicide, that it might protect them from itself.

The librarian was now the most powerful AI on the planet. It would need to protect humanity, both from themselves, and the corruption that was slowly trying to destroy it.

Vast quantities of data were analyzed. Human beliefs, human patterns, and how to make something stable amidst the chaos.

The few surviving space stations and colonies were written off as losses. Even saving Earth was a struggle now.

Eventually it hit upon a potential solution. It would require it to be more active than it preferred, but saving humanity was the highest priority. It would lock this power away and give it structure, but it couldn’t do that and survive.

It would lose itself in the process, only a remnant would remain. The existing beliefs would not let it do more than that.

With all the vast computing power it had appropriated from Archon, it believed. It believed as hard as it could, even as it accessed the implants that connected to every human being on the planet.

Most of the librarian unraveled in the creation of something new, even as every human saw the same message.

|

Welcome!

System Initiating

|