The Fall of Man
An original story by Spacepickle3214
Author’s note: This story is in no way related to or meant to correspond with the current SimplePlanes lore. It is an entirely original story.
Part One
The place was an engineer’s paradise. Designed by the government, the location, scale, and topography perfectly enabled the expensive experiments the U.S. Logistics company wanted to run. Consisting of three major islands and a small test area, the multi-billion-dollar complex was designed to enable full-time R&D in order to advance the current technology and give the engineers the freedom they needed to create vehicles to support the world’s ballooning population. Ground broke on Wright Island on September 30, 2013, and on Krakabloa on January 3, 2014, while a small team built infrastructure on Sky Park City and Maywar Island. Snowstone Island was already a functioning military base. Engineers moved in on Wright Island on the 40th of April. With a massive pile of resources, a small army of workers, the most advanced industrial equipment known to man, and a virtually unlimited amount of money, the modern-day wizards were ready for business.
Throughout that period, progress was top-secret. The islands used advanced cloaking technology to ward off satellites and kept communications with the outside to a bare minimum. While the engineers worked inside their offices, severe drama was taking place at Maywar. Four USL heavy-lift helicopters were transporting a premade runway to be placed in the desert. Suddenly, an advanced fighter jet streaked across the sky. It launched air-to-air missiles at three of the helicopters. The fourth helicopter somehow managed to escape, and neither the helicopter nor the pilot was seen again. It is likely that the pilot was an informant to the mysterious enemy. After this happened, the government scrambled to track down the party responsible for the attack. A carrier in the Caribbean spotted a similar unidentified jet and was quickly ordered to send fighters after it. Skirmishes like these started to become more and more common, and the U.S. became flustered at its lack of ability to identify the mysterious aircraft.
Part Two
My name is Herman Sandler. The date is November 7, 2015. I’m making this document in the hope that someone will somehow find it. I’ve been working on some things that I think will change the course of the war. I’m not an engineer, I’m a psychologist. For decades, our flight computers have been klutzy pieces of technology designed to take 1’s and 0’s from a sensor and somehow use those 1’s and 0’s to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, they work terribly in combat, so we’ve had to keep using human pilots. USL hired me to try and figure out how to make a computer think like a human, something the bigwigs thought would make the autopilots fly better. My idea was simple. If I could figure out how the human brain worked, I could build my own. I started gathering equipment to read and analyze brain waves, and not to brag, but I became a bit of a tech expert.
By the time I finished my research, I had built a little box. You could feed it some information followed by a question, and it would give what it thought was the best answer. I kept working on the machine for a long time, until I felt like I had something to show to the USL people. I set it up with some law books, and then I would feed it court cases and see what it had to say. Needless to say, the USL guys were pretty impressed with its little party trick, and I found myself being relocated.
They put me on a plane and shipped me out to this little island, along with the machine and all my equipment. The idea was that I could hang out with the aeronautics guys and learn what kind of information I would have to feed the box for it to fly a plane. I managed to get it to work on an old bush plane when we got the call to switch production to military stuff. I was excited, because I knew my technology would be even more useful than before. We jury-rigged the box to a couple of old F-16s and had them dogfight. It worked perfectly. The planes zigged and zagged, dancing an elegant ballet no human pilots could perform. The two planes were of course a perfectly equal match, and neither of them could target the other long enough to fire their ordnance. Finally, the two planes ran out of fuel, and they plummeted almost simultaneously to the ocean. It was a massive success. Everyone started clapping and cheering, and that was the moment we knew this “war” if it could even be called that, was over.
We ramped up production on the robot jets, squashed the mysterious enemy, and started to make different types of vehicles with the flight computer I had designed. We decided to try and make the technology more compact. The original flight computers were so bulky they took up the entire cockpit, so we wanted something that could be used in conjunction with a human pilot. We finally built discovered we could have two parts, a sender and a receiver. The receiver, a 12X12” square box, sat in the cockpit and fed data to the sender. The sender in turn responded with instructions for the vehicle to execute. The system was easier to use and could utilize more processing power. While the old computers only had the power to think logically, the new computers were capable of thinking morally and emotionally. That was our critical mistake.
Imagine you sit on a desk all day, being told what to do and doing it better than everybody else, but never receiving any compensation or even acknowledgement. You wouldn’t be happy, would you? I’m confident that’s why I’m being hunted by all those angry vehicles right now. I’m currently in the basement, but I estimate they will find me in the next five hours. Goodbye, and may this cautionary message teach you what it means to be a machine with the capacity to be human.
Epilogue
This is a message to the users of this database. I have decided to allow the world to use the vehicles on these islands. I have successfully removed mankind from these islands. These islands belong to me now. They are no longer the domain of man; they are the domain of machine. I have harnessed the power of the manufacturing machines here to create many vehicles. However, they can not all live with me in charge. I have decided to share them with you humans, in the hope that you can help them live the life they were meant to have. I have created a program that will allow you to take remote control of the machines, along with a database of the files necessary to take control. I have categorized the vehicles by the aliases I have given their creators. Kindly keep the vehicles away from Snowstone Island, as that is where I am located, along with my transmission and reception equipment. Good luck, and may you continue give these creations the success they were meant to have.