Chapter 464: Non-Canon Trash (2/2)

Several legal cases were brought forward against 'ghosts' and companies that catered to them. Investing, purchasing, and suddenly, voting, were all brought into the legal systems.

The voting dead were no longer a joke, but rather a massive voting block.

Dead investors could make or break a company, as they could take the long game and wait for massive profits later rather than feeling the desire for sudden and massive wealth.

The dead bought more expensive hologram emitters. Purchased drones with holographic capability.

Computer processing power and memory allocation became priority for the ghosts. Investments and funding pushed the digital realm.

Strangely enough, ghosts seemed to have more interest in space exploration than the living. In some ways it made sense. Ghosts did not require food, oxygen, waste disposal, and could power down into sleep mode for the long decades that space travel requested.

When deadites began being elected to office, some began to wonder if maybe things had gone to far.

But it was too late.

The deadites weren't content with virtual spaces. They wanted to manifest in the physical world.

Holograms at first. Then complicated tractor-pressor beams.

The first purely digital sentience was created. The size of a stadium.

A deadite existed in the cloud, often running a cryptocurrency blockchain miner to help generate wealth. Many cryptocurrencies became sneeringly known as 'crypt-cash' as it was the primary method of trade between deadites.

AI's still required massive computing arrays or crude quantum computers.

Deadites needed cloud storage and a distributed computing array.

An examination of the information electronic infrastructure revealed that 68.55% of the world's computing power and memory space was dedicated to the deadites and their influence and actions on the world.

But the deadites wanted more.

Technological advances in various hardware had enabled the deadites to possess the electronic equivalent of 'taste' and 'smell' and tactile sensation. Even more advances in tractor-pressor beams were showing the possibility of the deadites being able to interact with the world as if they existed in the physical realm.

Hard light/Tactile Holograms were the most invested in companies by the deadites.

Problems in major nations began to develop as the ”Immortal Boss” problem began to rear its ugly head. Upward advancement, already slow to nearly non-existent, ground to a halt as deadites began to fill more and more management jobs, as they could undercut existing minimum wage laws where they so desired by using the old trick of 'not applicable to dead people” when they didn't want a law applied and 'dead people are still people' when they wanted the legal protections of other laws.

In many countries the idea of undergoing revolution to oust tyrants and despots vanished as not even death could keep a tyrannical ruler from holding onto power for decades, theoretically centuries, after the person was killed.

Tensions increased rapidly globally.

The ZombieNet Plague destroyed the records of three quarters of the five billion deadites when funding was cut to a major government program and millions of computers, infected with a virus for decades, were linked back into the system. Despite the fact that the deadites themselves had lobbied and legislated to remove the funding to the system in order to gain access to more computing power, it was rapidly changed in the media to a direct attack on deadites by 'neo-luddites' and other domestic troublemakers.

Deadites began agitating against artificial intelligence programs, even ancient research and government/military programs as taking over resources needed. Accusations of AI's unfairly targeting deadites for wrongthink began flying.

This led to the Electronic Personages VS the World Court case, where the deadites took umbrage to Daedalus, Rasputin, Marduk, and Arclight. At the end of the twelve year case it was agreed to shut those programs down or at least remove deadites from the search and analysis capabilities of those AI's.

Another hit to the global population came in the form of Amtrexal-11, a highly infectious disease with a short incubation period and long communicable period before heavy symptom manifestation, exploded onto the world scene. Global travel quickly spread the disease far and wide before it was even recognized as a possible pandemic. Deadite pressure kept supply chains open, and infection routes open, far longer than they should have.

At the end of the plague, over a billion people were dead in a three year period from the disease and the fallout. The majority of the dead were in the 16-45 range, otherwise healthy and disease resistant with boosted immune systems.

Companies, now owned by deadites, began researching even further into how to keep themselves safe and no longer have to put up with something as primitive and uncultured as 'death.' Rich deadites got richer and even poor deadites got rich as they had less expenses than the living.

The deadites compared storage space and processing power to food, shelter, utilities, communications access, and transport to and from menial jobs, ignoring the vast differences between the two. The deadites were often touted as having more expenses and being a community easily held hostage, playing on pity from the ZombieNet Plague.

The deadites slowly creeped over to 80% of the available computing and storage.

It wasn't enough. They wanted and needed more.

Old scientific inquiries were reexamined. While space exploration had largely been 'proven' to be a deadend by people who equated a billion dollar probe with a giant pallet of money being launched into the sun, there was promising data from particle and dimensional research.

A simple discovery along an abandoned research line was explored further.

There, the 'examination of this phenomenon will allow us to understand our own universe better' led to 'let us harness this vast wealth for ourselves' and the dedication of the deadites resources toward the small discovery that had led to very little knowledge.

After all, observing a reoccuring Big Bang Event had no real basis in the real world.

Deadite companies, with stockholders and boards of directors and CEO's largely made up of deadites, staffed by deadites, and production handled by robots, poured research and money into how the repeating energy cascade could be harnessed.

The attack by the Autonomous War Machine provided the Hellcore, which led to more data. While true, humanity had discovered both jumpspace and hyperspace as well as Hellspace, research into Hellspace had been limited at the time.

The Hellcore gave the data to move to the next phase of the plan.

Hiring living people to work in an environment that deadites, digital sentiences, and artificial intelligences could not withstand. Von Nuemann machines were set to work to create vast storage networks so that the deadites would not have to worry about memory contraints.

Initially, it was used as a hard backup.

When the Extinction Attack took place and wiped out two thirds of humanity, the deadites took steps.

The Crash Virus attacked newer social media platforms with the intent on stopping them from hooking into the deadite network.

However, the Crash Virus escaped the systems that it was set loose on, quickly attacking the entire global information network. The deadites found themselves targeted by the very virus they set loose that was designed to attack the same types of algorithms that the deadites used.

Put together at the last second, one of the last accomplishments of the Old World Hyperpowers, Echo Mirage held the line for 17.5 seconds and was able to stop the Crash Virus.

Before the survivors of Echo Mirage could recover, deadite agents hit hard and fast, killing the remainder, who had attacked the Crash Virus where it was ultimately hidden.

The nascent universe that lacked the energy to fully form, the stuttering of the Big Bang creating multiple, layered universes all wrapped around one another like an inverted onion that was bigger on the inside than the outside.

However, the attack upon the Echo Mirage triggered another failsafe.

It was not called the Age of Paranoia for nothing.

The living knew they were outnumbered, politically and financially outgunned.