Log Entry #60: The Knowledge Vault

As soon as Michael agreed to Ision’s conditions for the rescue of Atlantean and angel children, I was given full access to the memory cube that Ision called the Knowledge Vault. While he was still talking with Michael and the others, I took the liberty to finally see what was really inside that piece of ancient memory. Part of me wished I did not, and not for the lack of information I found. You know that term information overload? I experienced exactly that. There were virtual mountains of data stored within that cube, and it was all a jumbled mess. Even your computer systems have some sort of organized filing structure so you would know where everything is. If there was one governing this piece of memory, it was long gone or it simply decided to call it quits, considering the sheer mass of data stored inside.

Not that the data was degraded or corrupted in any way; by retrieving more recent entries, Ision and I were able to retrieve all the information that was transmitted by Atlantean drones after Ision’s digitalization. It was how data was stored inside, as a massive mound of blankets haphazardly layered in one humongous pile, without any index to explain what was what. No convenient search function to speed up the process if I wanted to look for… let’s say weapon systems, or something similar. A better explanation would be the biggest city library you can envision, which had an indoor hurricane that caused all the books to mix without any sense of order, and then a crazy Vegas dealer shuffled that mess a few times.

It is a good thing I am not so easily discouraged, even if it will take me months of real-time to create some sort of order out of this jumble.

For now, I decided to do a fast look around through all the information strata going down the ages. By doing this, I managed to get something of a Cliff Notes version of recent angel race history, and the conditions before the demon’s attack. When I say recent, I mean looking at the chronological data files before that one colony ship escaped the invasion. The last thirteen thousand years were a drop in a bucket of the immense storage capacity inside of the Knowledge Vault.

To put it mildly, the entire angel civilization was one in a decline, a bare shadow of what they once were. As Al would colorfully say it, they had already swum through an excrement creek without the paddle and came out on the other side smelling like shit.

It all started a thousand years before demons showed up, while they were at their technological peak. Similar to the conditions the Earth will be facing soon, they had serious problems with the lack of resources and extreme overpopulation.

Planet Gaina of those times was a densely populated world, with billions of angels living in the massive cities. Tall skyscrapers were almost everywhere since most of the surface was urbanized. Even their seas sported floating cities, not for the scenery, it was due to the fact that they needed more living space. All other species on the planet were either extinct or were on an endangered list. Just to feed such a teeming population was a Herculean effort, which had an expiration date. They even started building undersea cities, yet those were not as popular as that environment severely limited their ability to fly.

As it is for us, they heavily invested in technology, hoping it will find the solution to their growing problems; frequent wars were waged, revolving around the use of strategic resources by individual countries.

They almost made it; it would have taken such a short time for them to start the colonization of space, the carry out the same idea Michael had. Except—they wanted more; specifically, new planets that could be used to relieve excessive population pressure. That is why they sent countless probes into interstellar space, searching for viable worlds that would be suitable for their unique needs. It is not easy to find planets with an exact atmospheric composition and gravity that lets you use those wings, but space is big enough so it was a matter of persistence and luck.

Few probes returned, with promising results, so the angels started building colonization ships, which were supposed to carry the first bunch of colonists to a brighter future.

A few research stations in their solar system were established, and a small space station that was mostly used as a place where the ships’ builders were living.

The words cannot describe the immense efforts it took for them to build all that, and the enormous amount of materials they needed to accomplish it all, despite the diminishing resources their planet could provide. Previous generations had lived without thinking of the future ones, and had depleted most of those resources. Why does that sound so ominously familiar to me?

Unfortunately, those ships never got the chance to fulfill the reason for their creation; at that time, the world war started on Gaina, and it almost destroyed them all. This is where information in the Knowledge Vault is a bit too sketchy. Large tracts of memory from that time are missing, as if those who were responsible for loading data in it were purposefully omitting some things.

From a few fragments I was able to dig up, the project to create an AI showed much promise. The idea was that a far superior intelligence would find a way to solve their problems in a much shorter time-frame since they were well aware that time was not something they had in abundance.

Avenues of creating a traditional AI by way of programming code were tried and deemed a failure, so the program of transferring an angel mind into a digital realm was started. It was a success and a failure at the same time. Of a few subjects that had volunteered for the program, most failed to initialize. The one that did, developed some serious psychological problems, or to say it simply—he became nutty as a fruitcake. As I stipulated so many times before, an AI can be a force of great calamity if it turns crazy. The malignant sapience managed to escape the confines of the research facility and was free in their version of the Internet. They had a real Skynet situation on their hands, and very soon all their problems with overpopulation disappeared, erased by nuclear fire.

There were a few insinuations that the AI may have been released on purpose by a few zealots that wanted to destroy their enemies. My conclusion was that the tensions were simply too great at the time, and the various countries couldn’t agree on who would get to go on colony ships. It is an act of insanity if you think about it, destroying things because you are impatient to wait for your turn. As an outsider, I could see several avenues that would have defused the situation and would uplift their culture to even greater heights. But as they say, hindsight is 20/20, and anyone can be wise after the fact.

That was the downfall of the angel civilization; what happened next was a group of survivors trying to save as much as they could. Fortunately, a few undersea cities were spared from the harsh outside conditions. Their dream of new colonies had died; all they could think about was to survive. It had taken them almost a thousand years to reclaim parts of their past glory, but they had turned themselves into their version of Luddites in the process. Turning their backs on high technology which caused them such misery, and almost made their species extinct. It was not all bad, especially for the damaged ecosystem. The new angels were preservationists, caring about their environment a hell of a lot more; resurrecting thousands of species that were lost in their ancestors’ technological race.

By the time the demons came, they had become somewhat of a totalitarian regime. Where a few priests decided what the people would think, what could be researched, and read.

Those who were deemed heretics to their new way of life, by prying into forbidden technologies, or by adhering to new ideas, were exiled utilizing one of the few space-faring vessels that were still functional from the times before. They were banished to the research station that Mikell and the refugee children ultimately escaped from.

It took depressingly little time to go through the few pieces of information the Knowledge Vault had on demons. Those were all recent entries before the colony ship’s exodus and did not paint a big enough picture. There was a language file that the angels received while still negotiating with the ships above their planet, and the information that Mikell’s father agents sent from the planet during the attack.

Something was wrong with the entire picture; so many things did not fit. The demons knew far more about the Angels than they should have, including their language and customs.

Did they find one of the probes and followed it back to the Hemina star system? That was one of the theories I thought as most likely; it was a disturbing reminder that the universe was not a warm and fuzzy place and that there should be written ‘Here be dragons’ on any undiscovered part.

In 1977 humanity did something similar, sent a Voyager out in that Stygian darkness, with a gold record that gave too much information to potentially antagonistic species. After that, we sent several more, to make sure we were found; the powers that be decided to place detailed instructions on where we are. I am all for exploration and I respect the spirit in which those actions were made, still… It is all fine if the universe is populated by peaceful entities… but the data tells me it most certainly is not.

Oh, and finding out your whole existence was a case of mistaken identity was a blow to my ego. I wonder if I should feel like one of those children who get to confront the fact they were created by an accident… or a malfunctioning prophylactic. Then again, if that MI on the Excalibur was a bit smarter, there was a good chance I would not exist at all, and Michael would have died on the bottom of that shaft. I will do the prudent thing and not think of all those grim possibilities.

There was something puzzling inside of the Knowledge Vault, entire blocks of data were locked to me. Ision doesn’t know anything about it and has no idea how to get inside. There are some aspects to this thing that are still a mystery, and as I said, it will take me a longtime to look through it all. Well, I am swamped with too many projects I try to do at once, yet there is so much scientific information inside this alien flash drive, I’m sure it will give me more ideas about some new projects… lucky me.