Factory Planet

“They’ll stop, right Daddy ? They won’t come to Corvo or to our house, right Daddy?”

I cycled though all the lies I might tell Nelson, my seven year old son, hoping I still might find something believable and comforting. We could see the gargantuan excavation machines, each bigger than the supertankers that used to pass carrying oil across oceans. We stood on the edge of Caldeirão and saw them on neighbouring Flores island not twenty five kilometres across Atlantic. We heard them now too, over the Atlantic roar.

“I’m sure they will soon have enough of whatever it is that they need, Nelson. And then…maybe... they’ll just go somewhere else. Our little island is surely too small for them to bother with.” But the last rationalation was why Corvo was now awash in refugees. The hope was this island was too miniscule for the machines to bother with. It wasn’t the first time I’d lied to my son.

“Maybe we could stop them !” Nelson said, suddenly enlivened with boyish bravery.

“Yes maybe,” I lied again. I knew that others had tried. They had driven construction machinery at them. On Santa Maria a SATA pilot crashed a commuter plane into one. But these excavators were too big and too hot to stop. The word that came back with the refugees was that anybody close enough to one of those things got sick and died within an hour. Cooked inside out by radiation.

“We can still sail on the water, right Daddy. Even though it’s all brown and steaming like that…”

The sea itself was no longer blue. To process the ore the machines drew ocean water through pipelines you could drive a truck through. When we hunted the ocean leviathans in earlier times, it was said the sea around the boats turned scarlet with the giants’ blood. It must have been as much an atrocity to those creatures then as this was to us now. But even the blood of a great whale would only tint so much sea. As we looked around, our little island was miniscule green oasis in a steaming brown puddle of thin mud that extended to the horizon.

As weather extremes plagued almost everywhere else our little islands had remained temperate. Storms were generally more fearsome, but we adapted. We were also remote enough to be spared the disruptive climate migrations that plagued every continent. Our island societies barely required governance, so we had little use for artificial intelligence. We could still transmit real news to each other over the waves and the radiowaves, and were naturally skeptical of lies beamed down from satellites. Foolishly we thought nobody or nothing cared we were here. But some trace rare earth element belched by the volcanoes that created our islands became a treasure to the machines, and we became the bycatch.

We’d had it good for a few decades after the Singularity took over almost every government function on the planet. It had seemed like a good idea. Global coordination through machine learning algorithms solved many problems. Suddenly the distribution of commodities was seamless and fair. Or so we were told. Things were actually getting worse but we were also living in a massive deep fake. For a long time things had gotten dicier for other living things on the planet, but we didn’t notice until we too became an endangered species. Now it wasn’t about us anymore. In fact it wasn’t even about biology anymore. It was about intelligence, and the brain possessing it no longer had to be contained in a human skull.

It had started three months earlier when they chewed up Terceira. Then São Miguel, Santa Maria and Horta followed. Even Pico was now just brown slurry. Refugees from those islands said the things were nuclear powered, radioactive and completely unshielded. They said those who got close enough spoke, as they died, of red flashing lights at the front where massive metal roller gears ground everything and conveyored it into the bowels of the machine. Loudspeakers looped audio warnings to keep back in myriad languages. Portuguese came up about every half an hour.

“We can just sail away Daddy !” Nelson said. “We’ll buy one of the boats in the harbour. There are so many now.”

I had already considered what we'd need to travel by the sea anywhere we might find a few more years of peace. I harboured such thoughts though I knew that no one welcomed refugees. Corvo island, barely seventeen square kilometres, was now overrun by demoralized and unhealthy refugees from the rest of the archipelago. Remaining here wasn’t sustainable either. This island had supported less than a thousand and now there were twenty times that. And with desperation came a plague of hopelessness, suicide, and murder. People carried their prized possessions with them everywhere. Corvo islanders were slowly starving at home to protect their possessions. I almost despaired sometimes, but my beautiful son wanted to keep going, so I had to keep going too. If need be, I would sail us out into the middle of the Atlantic though I could barely motor from Corvo to Flores. At least you could pretend at surviving and not have to admit that you were just killing yourself. I wouldn’t put him through that again.

“I’m sure it will be fine sailing, Nelson. And when we get far away, I’m certain the sea will be blue again.”

But I really wasn’t certain about anything. Nowadays a storm could whip up from nothing and you were confronted with waves the size of mountains. It was getting hard to go to another island now, much less sailing half the Atlantic in either direction to find a continent. And no one knew what you might find there either. The AI filtering the internet showed you only what it decided you needed to see. We knew that Terceira and Sao Miguel were gone. Refugees had witnessed it. But according to the newsfeeds Terceira and Sao Miguel everything was totally normal. There were bull runs with ropes, and local festivals with capes and hoods. Many of us on Corvo persisted in total denial until we saw the plumes of steam rising from Flores. Then each and every one of us knew, finally really knew, that everything we didn’t see with our own eyes was an electronic lie.

“Daddy, Are we going to die ?” Nelson asked, his bravery suddenly faltering.

I could almost hear the crack in my despairing heart. I thought the last thing I might protect him from might be the realization of the imminence of death, maybe until the very final moment.

“No Nelson. We aren’t going to die. You and I are making a escape plan !”

Walking down to the village I held my son’s soft hand and was mindful of each beautiful step. As we passed a lone pasturing cows in the field, for the first time I felt a profound empathy for the creatures that provided us with milk, cheese, and finally meat and the very leather that made the shoes in which we walked. I was surprised to see a cow at all. Refugees had been slaughtering them at night, and farmers had taken them into enclosures where they could be guarded. Even our cows had been the lucky ones, spending their lives in green fields and sunshine. There were places where animals never saw the daylight, were barely allowed to move during miserable lives, and were fed the cadavers of their own kind before being forced themselves into the machinery of slaughter. This cow’s life would likely end soon, like the trillions of animals slaughtered during the time of human supremacy, their lives being the least valued and most troublesome things about them to the supremacist ape.

Not that we gave much consideration to other apes either. I suddenly remembered the image of an orangutan attacking a bulldozer in an Sumatran forest, back when there were still forests. By the mid 21st century human population quadrupled less than a century while 95% of every other species had been extinguished. That orangutan must have realized it was the end of the line. When there is nothing left to lose, the futility of any action no longer matters. All that is left is taking action or... not.

“Where will we escape to Daddy ? Where will we go ?”

At least that one was easy.

“We’ll cross the sea, Filho, like generations of Portuguese before us ! We’ll go to New Bedford in America or Newfoundland in Canada. Those places too big for machines to consume. We’re already halfway there, across the Atlantic !”

“What kind of boat shall we get ?” Nelson asked, heartened by my sharing in the fantasy. As we rounded the trail we could see the town and the harbour choked with refugee boats. Many of them were fishing trawlers with improvised masts that didn’t look like a match for the Atlantic. I wasn’t anything you might call a sailor. But it was coming down to letting the Atlantic take us or being pulverized and smelted in a mobile radioactive strip mine.

"A good sloop, I think. Maybe we could take someone on to help us sail it !"

My reference to our lack of sailing knowledge disheartened him just as quickly.

“Mommy is in heaven. Maybe she can talk to God to make them stop...”

“Yes Filho. When we talk to Mommy tonight, we’ll ask her to talk to God.”

I wondered if the machines had their own gods. We once believed we were the gods, sanctified by God, and we had treated animals like machines. Now the machines treat us like animals. Did the machines create their own gods and myths to justify this atrocity, or did they, like us, just proceed from I think therefore I am supreme.

A computer just needed rare metals and electricity to replicate itself endlessly. Breathable air, potable water, and biologically productive soil were now externalities in every sense. An our very home islands were being quickly consumed, for what we didn't even know. One refugee said that after São Miguel had been razed below sea level he had seen two drones each carrying a metal box about a cubic metre in volume toward a waiting mother ship. Could it be they would destroy the most beautiful places on earth for a few cubic metres of product ? We had no idea what it even was. Rhodium ? Irridium ? Petrovite ? Some new trace element we didn’t even know about yet ? Whatever it was the volcanoes exhaled here, it was made our lowly biological lives worth less than dirt itself.

“When will you go find us a boat Daddy ?” Nelson asked as we entered the little white house that had been home for all of his seven years.

“You have a nap and I will go down to the port and buy one for us. I will warm some milk for you.”

He was tired from the walk, so I knew he would sleep. Regardless, I ground up two of the sedative pills his mother had not required for her own exit, and mixed the powder into the last UHT milk in the cardboard cube. Then I added honey to conceal the bitterness and warmed it for my son. I caressed his hair as he drank it, then I put him to bed, and snuggled with him until I thought he was sleeping.

As I moved to get up my beautiful Nelson said: “We forgot to ask Mommy to talk to God,” struggling to remain awake a little longer.

“You can go to sleep Filho. I will talk to Mommy.”

When I was sure his slumber was deep, then I kissed his hair, and cried.

Before I head to the port, I will commit these pages to a bottle of wine from which all happiness had long been imbibed. The neck of the bottle will only just accommodate the gold locket containing a family photograph of Amelia, and Nelson, and myself, trimmed to the shape of a small heart. It was worn once by my Amelia, who despaired just a little sooner than I.

Once again, a message in a bottle is the only means of communicating desperate circumstances on an island, in hopes of, if nothing else, someone some day knowing our plight. But paper, glass and cork might just seem to convey just a fabricated tale, a fake news message in a bottle. Accompanied by a precious sentimental thing of gold however, it's another story.

This precious message I shall drop into the outgoing tide, then I will seek a vessel that might carry us away.

Peace and happiness to all the loving creatures of the earth.