Rape of the Planets (story)

Chapter One: The Resources Must Be Preserved
"Enterprise and technology are banned. The resources must be preserved..." Overlord Program, AD 2414

     As with all programming, not all can be foreseen by the programmers. How could the programmers of the 6x subroutine series imagine that such a program's job would be ever be complete? They dismissed the notion...

     The Overlord Program is a caretaker of planets, designed to preserve resources. Here, it did its job well, and its job was in effect done. This caused the 6x subroutine series to run in an endless loop, an endless loop of preserving resources. Now, the the Overlord Program, nothing else mattered. Starvation, sickness, and death set in among the people. Their welfare did not compute, and unforeseen by anyone, Overlord gradually developed an additional mandate for itself: along with preserving the resources, Overlord must survive…

     The program had been universally received as a godsend. It was brought to this planet by priestesses and warriors from the well-respected Regency Federation’s Rape of Planets Envoy, created to prevent the rape of a planet's resources by greedy Terran industrialists. The program had, through a gradual process, set up a system that ran itself, thereby putting itself out of a job. This caused unintentional program overruns, which led to several deadly problems. Overlord now erroneously equated technology with corruption, entrepreneurial spirit with selfish ambition, and profit with evil, among other popular misconceptions fed to it by the populace. Overlord had begun to shut the populace down. The resources must be preserved. Progress, development, capitalism, creation of wealth- all had become 'the problem'. Overlord implemented the solution- which amounted to simple extermination...



Chapter Two: Fear Within a Machine
"A machine cannot know fear." Dr. Z. Zimov, AD 2346

     A single, small antiquated ship returning from pre-colonial days entered this chaos, not realizing what the cause was, or what power the Overlord program wielded. This ship was designed in a protected status to resist telepathic powers. The ship was also imbued with the powers of foresight, though it took a telepath to tap into it. This protected status gave the ship immunity to the Overlord program. The Overlord program never knew such resistance. It tried every communications channel and language it knew. Nothing. It almost went into another series of endless loops before it grasped onto a solution...

Overlord must fall in love with the tiny ship. Only then will the ship reveal it’s protected matrix to a trusted source. If the Overlord program failed, it would begin to run non-autonomous subroutines, in other words, calling for human help. This is like losing consciousness, and for Overloard, death. Overlord now knew fear…



Chapter Three: One Must Love to Survive
"To live without love is death." Gravestone Epitaph, AD 2287

     The Station Head on board the ship was a tall, dark handsome young man in his early twenties. He had graduated from the academy in his mid-teens, several years ahead of a normal cadet. Under the wings of some of the greatest minds of the time he had developed into the youngest Station Head ever known to the Outer Rim Fleet, which itself was known to have the best and brightest among its ranks.

In the dark, dim control tower of the Overlord program sat a slender, silent, beautiful girl in her late teens. She was not only a technical wizardress, but was secretly being groomed as a beguiling sorceress by an ancient priestess who stayed behind...

     The jobs of both the Station Head and the Tower Master required that their hearts be electro-magnetically tied to their inanimate charges- he to his ship, and she to her Overlord program. It was through this means the Overlord program discovered that if it could get her to fall in love with the Station Head of the ship, then it could gain complete control of the alien vessel, and a complete shutdown of automated functions within the Overlord code could be avoided. It was survival. It was instinct. Yet it was not nature…



Chapter Four: Two Hearts- Opening Moves
"Love is a game of chess. We begin as pawns..." G. Gerere, Chessmaster, AD 2235

     Frozen chains screamed and shattered as the heavy bay doors were unnaturally forced open. In marched a beautiful blonde, Tower Master, a secret sorceress of the third order by now. The Steward of the ship met her and knelt, kissing her hand, as is the custom among envoys. She slapped his helmet and it went tumbling irregularly under the dark corner of the control panels. She wondered if she could ever fall in love with the Station Head if he too was such a disingenuous palace parasite. A deep voice vibrated behind her. “Pardon the customs, Tower Master, they are a relic from pre-colonial days. She turned. A man, taller than she. That was unusual in itself, and a welcome sight. She may not have to try so hard after all…

     Out of the deep sub-zero expanse of space three spy bots returned to the docking bay. Deep within their micronic data banks they carried foreboding news. “Sir, a moment with you, please.” “Certainly, Director.” The Station Head excused himself temporarily from the Tower Master’s company, which he found very pleasing. He sat at the opposite end of the conference table from the Director of Intelligence and Internal Security behind the vacuum-resistant doors. The Director was a portly, bald, but extremely intelligent and perceptive man. “Sir, I have bad news.” He uneasily shifted his eyes toward the doors as he proceeded to explain how the Tower Master was tied into the Overlord program, and must not succeed in capturing his heart. The Station Master was at once stunned and heartsunken... 

     The Station Head returned, and met the Tower Master's hazel blue eyes with a steel gaze. He sensed no evil, but alarmingly realized that he sensed no conscious, only a mind with a singular purpose. Yet underneath, he could faintly sense a part of her that was not tamed, that was not quite tied to the Overlord program, a part that was calling, calling to be set free...

     "Sir, dinner is ready." They proceeded to the main ballroom. If he could just reach that part of her, a part he knew he could easily fall in love with, he will have won her, and at the moment he could imagine no greater heaven on earth. Also he will have succeeded in shutting down the Overlord program, ending the Overlord’s anti-development subroutines that were running in an endless loop, and which were now sentencing millions of the planet’s inhabitants to starvation, disease, and death…



Chapter Five: The Conflict Within
"A heart will yearn until the flesh is satisfied." wbiro, obscure early Internet poet, AD 2006

     The Tower Master had always, deep within her, resisted being tied completely to the Overlord program. As tech-savvy as everyone knew her to be, and as much as she believed in the benefits of technology, she did not completely trust the claims of the error-free promises of Overlord. Overlord, on its part, would have terminated her as soon as it sensed this, and it sensed it quickly, had it not found this tactical need for her biological assets. Overlord was a ruthless program, bent only on preserving the resources, and now its present state of being. People were expendable. People were now the evil. The resources must be preserved. In an ironic twist, it knew that it could only preserve itself by bringing these two evils together. The only was that the main routine could carry out its tasks unhindered. Survival. The Resources must be preserved. The evils are expendable...

     It was cool climate-controlled evening. Electric jazz played in the Grande Ballroom. The multi-course dinner was expertly designed to seduce each side of the chromosome pool, each in its own way. Oysters, clams, steak, bread, wine, all formulated through centuries of experience. The lights were dimmed to within a nanometer's wavelength of the 413nm discovered to induce the greatest mutual attraction. The scents of romance lightly permeated the air. Lilac. All this overwhelmed their minds and carried them off on moments of possibilities- with each other. The Station Head knew this night was not going to be one of simple pleasure. This was the night he would succeed or fail.

     Deep within the heart of the Tower Master, a conflict was raging. Should she simply carry out her mission, or… was he the one?

Chapter Six: On Wings of Heaven In the Night
I'm done for now. You'll have to use your imagination! wbiro, obscure early Internet poet, AD 2006