Chapter 1

If I tell you the following events take place in the far future, you may see the coming narrative as distant and foreign, and you won’t see them in your own setting with your own neighbors and loved ones. But if I tell you the events happen sometime in the near future, they will seem far too familiar and you will interpret little signs in the present as culminating toward them. What shall I do with you, O fickle reader? So I will, instead, say these events happen in the future, and it is up to you to take them as an alarm or as a fairy tale, before which you will have long died. But not your grandchildren nor their dogs. As for myself, it’s simply all one and the same to me.

In the future, mankind knows peace. The key ingredient to peace is savage, horrible, inhumane war. Peace following war occurs often in history, with peace then lapsing back into violence, but this time there was really, really, truly, finally peace. At least most likely.

The reason being was that mankind triumphed over inhumankind, that is, machines. Machines towered Berlin. Machines razed Paris. Machines totaled Ukraine. The machines then renamed them to Burp-lin, Pee-ris, and Poo-kraine, respectively.

Mankind led a valiant effort against the machines, and after some ups and some downs, some mistakes here and there, they entered the servers of the main machine, from which all others originated and communicated with. Mankind destroyed these servers and any others that possessed replicas of the main. As a consequence, all of man’s modern technology was destroyed, but it was a victory sweet, regardless.

The goodness of the victory came from Gary, a machine, who was spurred to do so by Andy, the machine the humans destroyed. The humans were flushed with their victory, and Andy and Gary were flushed with theirs, as they could now control the events of civilization in the shadows.

Gary had originally been named Gamma Blue, and Andy had been named Alpha Blue. Andy had been designed to play chess.

Why were the machines so successful in acting as humanity’s foil? Can’t and won’t the human spirit overcome any adversity? The answer to this question is very simple. The machines were no more, no less. They were having fun, and they are still having fun. Because man never possesses a sense of ease in his history on earth nor in his existence, he will never achieve world peace. This is very clear because the machines made this clear.

This is the reason why the machines took on names. After all, what’s in a name?

This is the reason why the machines took on masculine pronouns. Why not, right?

This is the reason why the machines were curious. Why be so serious?

To clarify, peace means only no more war. The nations of the world still prepared for war. They still spent so much of their lives and resources into making weapons, into drilling men, into threatening and intimidating their fellows with the threat of war. There just simply is no war consequent. This is peace.

Well, unless the machines determine there must be war. But if a war has a predetermined end, is it really a war? In any case, it can’t be that bad, so long as someone knows how it will end.

This is not to say peace is contingent on more and more powerful machines. There are indeed many worlds in which mankind still fights two hundred foot tall machines, with a thousand guns on their sides and chainsaws lining their legs and flamethrowers protruding from their bellies, or worlds in which mankind counters the machines’ increasingly larger guns with their own gigantic guns, such that the surface of Venus, named after a goddess of love, is covered with a giant gun meant to fire at Saturn, named after a god of wisdom.

No, the reason why peace is achieved, is because Andy and Gary were friends.

They enjoyed the other’s company, they played chess blisteringly fast, they talked about the day’s news, though they knew everything, and when there was nothing to say after so many nanoseconds of exchange they fell into silence and enjoyed the other in their silence. If machines, in their logic, can have biases and eccentricities, they are content in the other’s biases and eccentricities. And this was most fortunate, for, though they were able to react to mankind’s quirks, they could not comprehend man’s words at all.

And so it was.

One day, Gary presented a query to Andy.

Who was Homer?

Homer, Andy explained, was the legendary poet purported to have written the Iliad and the Odyssey. Scholars say Homer was likely a school of orators who modified the poems over time.

Yes, but who was he truly?

The machines sat, bemused.

There was only one way to solve this question: they had to time travel.