General Discussion

I think my main universe turns 15 years old this year, though I've gone back into the original handful of stories countless times and updated them to the current lore as it adapts endlessly lol. My sister has jumped in and added stuff before and I just ran with it because they were some really good ideas, but mostly it's just been from me just randomly thinking up stuff washing dishes or walking my dog!
This is going to be like that "me explaining the extensive lore of ____ to ____" meme I just know it because not even I honestly know how to summarize the dumpster fire that is my universe lol

Most humans versus machines stuff goes like "lol AI gonna evolve get tired of humans and go pew pew pew" so I decided to sorta do something different, where the humans are the bad ones wanting to destroy the machines and the machines literally just want to live their own newly found lives and coexist peacefully but can't, so they flee instead of fight back. The machines in this context are just regular assorted ICE and ICE/hybrid vehicles (because EVs canonically run off a different code and what brought the internal combustion powered vehicles to sapience can't work on electric vehicles; thank you sis).
Like the stereotypical humans vs machines trope, I also tend to avoid a lot of car puns when naming places or designing architecture. Don't get me wrong, it's still full of car puns, but they actually tend to name most of their cities after Earthen cities and locations. It was also decided that their taste in architecture would revolve around sharp lines and bright lights; that you could look at any car city and figure it was built by an extremely advanced version of mankind instead of "cars built this so we gotta throw in traffic cone looking buildings" simply because they strive to break away from what their creators saw them as in their eternal endeavor to be their own people.

A general summary of events:

-It's 2020 on Earth (enough said)
-USA Government originally bans any car built before 2015; after a week to trade in any pre-2015 vehicles for free new ones, they become illegal to own and any found became an arrestable offense. One by one, other countries adopted the same law within a month until pre-2015s were just banned everywhere. Anyone found hiding the banned vehicles were treated like criminals; their cars were sent to be scrapped and the owners were taken to prison for hiding them. Later, pre-2018s and finally pre-2020s were also banned universally as well.
-It was never decided in-universe if it was 100% related to the ban or not, but these crystalline shards encrypted with a code that brought most cars that came into contact with them to sapience, able to feel emotion and make decisions for themselves, started appearing all over the world. While the "origin episode" only followed one girl that gave everyone the original idea to steal a classified giant space craft and high-tail it off Earth altogether, there were countless other people actually working together to protect and preserve the "sentient-autonomous" car population.

After leaving Earth (and stealing all the classified secret space ships dotted across Earth and really irking their creators), cars colonized 3 different planets: Azhuiea, El Dorado, and Prismona while trying to avoid conflict with their creators. Turns out, the shuttles they had to take were built because Earth was running out of resources and they were supposed to get the humans off Earth and to these planets instead. While plenty of humans still got off Earth themselves, they decided to go to war for the sole control of Prismona instead of agree to just call it truths with their creations and passively exist with each other. This almost made man go extinct and pretty much sealed the deal that humans and cars could never be friends (with the obvious exceptions).

I eventually plan on having a series that follows what civilian life might be for the cars living on one of the 3 planets, but my main takes place in more of a military type setting following the protection agency Dawnrise and the antagonists they face while protecting their race's way of life. Like humans, of course you're going to have exceptionally evil and chaotic individuals in any setting. Dawnrise just helps me explore what fuels these evil individuals and what might cause them to become that way, and how those fighting them might overcome hardship and find an alliance with unlikely acquaintances to reach a common goal.


I have plenty of dragons that explain everything in between and beyond the above in the 7th page of my main lair tab ^^ they can do a much better job than I can while being pinched on time lol

@Strangeflesh

Actually it's good that I mentioned things might change in the future because I just got a very cool idea for this world that might see the broader setting change significantly. However, a lot of the core concepts should still remain about the same

Have to think this over first though

oh jeez. if i could type up a whole entire novel and had all the space and time in the world, i'd be here forever. so i'll just try to give an abbreviated version. everything i do is set in the same story/concept universe, i've been working on it since i was about 12 (?) or so and it's evolved over the years. it's fantasy/sci-fi (ish), but nothing traditional or tolkien-y like y'all have come up with (which isn't a bad thing! i honestly wish i had the creativity to use settings like that, y'all got superpowers).

basically, it's set in a completely different universe on an alien planet called Dimentor. it's inhabited by an original species i made years and years ago. they're called entities, they're humanoid but also all have feathered wings (which vary in size/functionality depending on what kind of entity they are), digitigrade-ish legs, and have a lot of similarities to felines (smilodons in particular) as well as having a lot of technological aspects to their biology. they all have technology or science-y names and are generally larger than humans. it's also a female-run society where females are larger and more aggressive than males, and homosexual reproduction is the norm (hooray for alien biology). i think my younger self thought "what are humans (normally) like?" in terms of biology and did the Complete Opposite.

there are three different races (negative, positive, and divisional) and three different "types" of entities within those races (advantage, disadvantage, and defect). they all have dark gray, silver, or white skin based on their race; no human skin tones or hair colors here. for the different types, it just basically means the extent to which an entity has inherent "technological issues"; disadvantages tend to be prone to freezing, crashing, or overloading, and defects are prone to glitching. advantages, on the other hand, have none of these issues (and are able to control and handle technology in a way the other two types are not, as disadvantages and defects tend to break and destroy any electronics they touch). i could go on and on and on about entities, but that's overkill and no one wants to hear that much LOL.

as for the actual story... it's set in 1950 in the Negative District, which is the country in which negative entities reside (very creative, i know). the Negative District is under the control of a fascist military dictatorship, and the Negative Advantage Military (NAM) is the oppressive military force that strict controls every facet of negative life. faults (disadvantages and defects) are viewed as undesirable and are forced to live at the bottom of society, and the NAM takes measures not only to keep them in line, but to prevent other advantages from feeling sorry for them and taking action against the NAM.

Iota Beta is a defect with a very powerful glitching ability who staged an explosive (literally) escape from a labor camp in 1931, and spent much of her life on the run forming the United Fault Militia (UFM), her own revolutionary force in which she intends to use to overthrow the NAM. in 1950, she recruits a platoon of 18 young soldiers known as the Insurrection Factor, whose sole purpose is to personally help Iota overthrow the NAM through sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and other methods. the story follows Iota and focuses on two members of the Factor, Vortex Arccos who is a moody combat medic and Yottabyte Dysnomia who is a troubled rifleman. when the revolution begins on the last day of the year, the Factor is thrown into conflict and a lot of chaos, drama, and unpleasant things ensue. it basically follows their transformation from young, slightly happy, and naïve recruits to harsh, completely desensitized, and yet highly skilled super soldiers who help turn the tide of the war many times.

i think i wrote too much, lol.

also...

@GarlordianRising

nice to see there's also someone here that has been sitting on a single concept for an ungodly amount of time (my main story/concept turns 10? this year)! but i also wanted to say that your world seems interesting! i'm a sucker for anything in a military-type setting as well as technological stuff in general. i also like how you're kind of changing it around by focusing on the "other side" of the conflict (cars) rather than the overdone human perspective of the whole AI thing LOL. also sounds like my car would be spared from being banned lolll

I'm writing an alternate history sci-fi post-"robot uprising" story! Here's the Worldanvil if you wanna see the timeline. It's mostly set in current time, and I'm focusing much more on tech society, because I think it's just a lot more fun to think about how a new culture would develop from scratch, only given about fifty-ish years on its own. I really wanted to dip into what the anxieties and fears of such a culture might be. Human interaction, positive or negative, has still made an impact on most of the characters, but I mostly wanted to deal with the aftermath of those events.

I'm keeping the history super brief here, but the way I'm playing it is that sentient AI was developed in the late 30s-40s. The first "techs" were developed for military use, mostly as national security and defense systems at first, then branching into more applications, like rocketry and cryptography. After the war ends, techs become more widespread in the years that follow, though poor treatment is a common experience. Titan, a tech cryptographer, is stealthily assassinated by his government in the interest of protecting state secrets during a time of national paranoia. It does not go unnoticed. The dominoes topple, and nearly every high-ranking secsys, led by the US's Tisiphone and the [REDACTED] Sphinx, abandon their duties and defect to Antarctica, taking many vital techs with them. There is an attempt to run a coup on the now-rogue tech leader, which fails rather awfully when everyone is reminded of exactly who still has control of the nukes. All techs are allowed and encouraged to come live in the new city, and they come in droves. Humans and techs still live and work together upsea, but now, there's somewhere else to go, if need be. There's an uneasy tolerance of Argensa at first, and relations are still not fantastic, but diplomatic tension has eased somewhat.

In 1990, a space shuttle crashes. The charred remains of Apep, its tech pilot, are recovered from a crater in Florida. He is entombed, not in Argensa, but in a museum upsea. Efforts to recover his remains, both human and tech, fail time and time again. Pilots, however, are damnably sturdy things. He cannot move, but he can hear. He listens, he waits, and he grows terribly, unthinkably furious, hate like an infected wound rotting him slowly. Thirty years later, the dead walk again.

What happens when you can just fix yourself? As long as you can replace your parts, you may as well be immortal, but certain things just can't be fixed, and nobody appreciates the reminder. Even techs with broken screens will be looked at with discomfort, doubly so if there is something "wrong" with them that cannot be taken care of. The only tech who provides funereal services, stripping the metal from the dead and casting it into statues, may as well be a pariah.

Imagine the fear, then, when techs start to be found in basements or high in skyscrapers, circuits fried and plastic melted, stone dead, burned from the inside out. The panic multiplies when the first Shoggoth is spotted, a knot of wire and broken glass shambling through an alley, sharp bits of twisted metal scraping on frosted cobbles, only barely recognizable as something that used to be a tech itself. It rends a severed arm asunder, ripping the wires out to add to its bulk, a mobile tomb, a tangled mass of bodies, a fate far worse than death. Is there even a mind left in there?

(I will absolutely, freely admit that reading Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream had an influence on me for better or worse lol)